Recently I learned a bit more about copyright law and how it applies to educators. As it stands, most schools use the term "fair use" as a "carte blanche" to use copyrighted material any way they want. Although the law favors educators in many ways, it is important that teachers be aware that there is a line.
A majority of cases of "fair use" by teachers are clear cut. A teacher would be allowed to photocopy a chapter to send home with students. The law would favor the copywriter when that same teacher photocopied the entire book to save on having to buy copies from the publisher.
It gets difficult when we consider the nature of technology. Fortunately, there is an easy answer, its called Creative Commons. I'll walk you through how I used this website to locate a picture and be able to put it into my lesson while maintaing copyright law.
1st: I went to the website http://search.creativecommons.org/
2nd: I searched for an image. In this case, the EV1 electric car produced by General Motors in the 1990s and subject of the movie "Who killed the electric car?" I clicked the Search Using Google tab, but you have other options such as Flickr and Youtube
3rd: I eventually found a picture of a man Charging an EV1.
Now I can put this picture into a power point about the electric car.
I can also share my own images to complete the lesson. I'll do that in my next post. See you in a few minutes.
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