Educators and Copyrights

As a current Graduate Intern, I have become very familiar with the Internet as a primary resource. The internet has been a safe haven, where I can go and get great ideas for lessons, in addition to worksheets and PowerPoint Presentations. When I venture out to these many different sites I started to notice the “fine print”, which may go as follow: can be distributed for educational purposes. With that being said, I believe the most common infringement will be on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA which states “no copyrighted work may be copied, published, disseminated, displayed, performed, or played without permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with fair use or licensed agreement. This includes music, movies, and other copyrighted material,” is so easy to break because it’s very attainable and not to mention useful. The students today gravitate toward anything that is computer generated or as they say the “new, new”. Taking hold of this revelation, a teacher has to implement strategies that will keep the students interest and the best way to do this is to use digital base entities.

Like I stated before, as a current Graduate Intern (a fancy name for Student Teacher) I have to find effective approaches to reach learners who are very critical on the resources used in their instruction. Taking that criticality to heart can easily contravene on the Teach Act of 2002. The DMCA intermingles with the Teach Act of 2002 that states, “the use of technology measures that reasonably prevent further copying and distribution of copyrighted works.”

Lastly, as an educator we need to be aware of what guidelines to follow for our instruction. A teacher needs to be completely aware if he or she uses a PowerPoint Presentation that has music playing in the background in the hopes to enlighten their students on how to find the author’s purpose, the teacher needs to be fully aware that they are not breaking any federal laws. A person can have the greatest intentions in the world but can still be misinterpreted. I would hate for any educator to catch a federal case for their lack of knowledge on what is an acceptable approach in educating their students.  The Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines for Teachers “outlines a teacher rights under the copyright law and copyright guidelines”, which is just as important as the previously stated Acts but for respect of the assignment I will have to regard this law as the least important.