Teacher librarians teach others how to share, virtually

Creative Commons guide to symbols
Made available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

To add to the enormous challenge faced by teacher librarians in this ever evolving digital environment, they must now lead the way in teaching staff and students about what is allowed to be copied and shared from the Web. However, with the help of ‘Smartcopying‘ – an educational resource for schools, it may not be all that bad.

In the past, the copyright rules were fairly straightforward as they mainly related to copying from printed books. Now, there are so many formats in use and it has become so much easier to copy things.

Many students and teachers will not have any understanding of copyright, in regards to the Web. In fact, may teacher librarians will also be struggling to understand all of the new rules regarding copyright.

It is an area fraught with difficulties. Some teachers and students will have already been copying things without permission or attribution and may resist the instruction.

The TL may not be aware of what teachers are copying. The teacher may be unsure of what is allowed to be copied or ‘communicated’ (such as videos and music from iTunes). To combat these difficulties in communicating about the rules, ‘Smartcopying’ has been developed as a website resource for schools.

Smartcopying have made some videos to help teachers explain to students that even though it is easy to copy text, images and video from the web, it is not always allowed.’Fair’ use, as outlined by Smartcopying, does allow some copying of images and text, but it must be linked closely to the currciulum. Students should not be attempting to directly copy and distribute someone’s work. For example, a class may create some satirical lyrics to a well known song and produce that music, however, it would not be fair to distribute this commercially.

It can be overwhelming, for teacher librarians, when reading the Smartcopying website. There are so many different situations that should be understood, in regards to copyright. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel, with the help of the Creative Commons license. Students and teachers can search for images, music, videos or text, that have been made available for use under the Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons allows authors and artists to obtain a license and display this on their work, to allow others to use their work, but under their conditions. For example, a writer may wish others to use their work and encourage others to distribute their writing, but not commercially. They are able to provide a Creative Commons logo which indicates that anyone can use their work, but they must attribute the author. I have provided an example below, of using the Creative Commons logo, for my own work. It means you are free to use my work, as long as you share too.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.