Blog 2: Are Our Educational Materials Copyrighted?

Welcome back, everyone! As you all know, we all learned some new specs, and reinforced others, on the famous Office software, MS Word. I have been using MS Word in almost every type of setting ever since I can remember. When it comes to an educational setting, I have used MS Word mostly to write papers for class. Although I prefer to handwrite notes, MS Word has been helpful in note taking, especially when there is an established list of items that will partake in the note taking (like a final study guide). I've seen my educators use word to create documents like quizzes/tests, study guides, worksheets, etc. I assume that utilizing MS Word might be better at times, since some of the materials out there are copyrighted.

Speaking of copyright, I never actually put into account before that some educative materials handed by our educators in the past may not be fair use. My only experience with copyrighted material in an educational setting, that I know of, is when I was in TV Production in high school. For the videos we were producing in class, we could technically use any type of song or footage that we had to our disposal, since it wasn't being used for profit. However, our teacher, very intelligently I may add, encouraged us to only utilize material that was labeled "royalty free". This suggestion made sense because it is important to teach the students that 1) copyrighted material costs money and 2) their videos can still be amazing even with the royalty free footage. If I was a TV Production teacher, I would provide the same knowledge about royalty free material. As a matter of fact, I have a further solution to the copyright dilemma, as well as other technology implementation issues.

Along with providing the knowledge of useful royalty free material, I will also provide the students with subscriptions (whether paid by me or provided by the school) to websites holding copyrighted material that, once subscribed, is fair to be implemented in student videos. Now, some of these subscriptions come in layers and layers of premiums, therefore it is important that students do not abuse of the advantage they would be provided with. In order to keep their academic honesty intact, they would need to sign a syllabus in the beginning of the class semester detailing their knowledge of academic honesty in the classroom. And that goes for any type of honesty that belongs in a classroom. While academic honesty always has a place in a classroom setting, my copyright idea only works if I can break the digital divide among students and provide everyone with a computer to produce videos with. Granted, twenty Macs aren't cheap, however, one computer for a group of four to five students never became a huge issue when I was in TV Production. If anything, it taught me how to collaborate with my fellow peers and to trust their ideas and creativeness. Therefore, I believe this to be a good solution, one that will shape the students with important values for their future.

Until next time!

-The Tank