Week 1 Reading: Copyright Issues: Response to Sarah

Wk1/Blog4: Free Choice--Copyright & the Classroom

After listening to all of the information regarding copyright laws and fair use, it seems as though it's pretty difficult to easily incorporate copyrighted works into the classroom.  Permission can take a while to receive and would require intense future planning of lessons and projects.  I mentioned in one of the discussion boards this week that I use Prezi to introduce and review vocabulary words in my classroom.  A few weeks ago, one of the words was "awe." My students read the definition and I tried providing examples to paint a clear picture for them, but I could see they didn't really grasp what it meant to be in awe of something. Finally, I remembered the movie "Toy Story." At one point in the movie, the little green men in the toy vending machine are in awe of "the claw," and they "ooh" and "aah" over it.  Once I recalled that scene and shared that with my students, most of them knew exactly what the word "awe" meant. But this could have been so much more powerful if a movie screenshot or movie clip could have been used to portray this.  There were some students who hadn't seen the movie, and the connection didn't mean anything to them. It's instances like this that copyright laws can be disheartening. Even though the nature of the video clip I wanted to use was for educational purposes and not much of the movie would have been used, I didn't use it. After hearing the things in the videos this week, I'm glad I didn't.  The lesson could still be taught without the video clip, so it wasn't an absolute necessity that this clip be incorporated into the lesson.

Sarah-

You have some valid points in your post in regards to copyright and fair use.  Seeing that you would have used "Toy Story" in the classroom, I believe you would have been OK using the clip.  When I taught Language Arts a couple of years ago, we were using the College Board SpringBoard Curriculum.  For the 6th grade curriculum, they had to analyze part of "The Lion King" with plot and climax.  When using movies as a part of your curriculum, it is under fair use.  Now, if you wanted to just show it to a large mass of people and say that you created it, then you would be breaking copyright laws.

"Toy Story" picture from creativecommons.org