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Today I attended a presentation by the Utah Open High School of Utah, which is a free online, accredited high school here in Utah. In their presentation, they used or talked about Twitter, Voicethread, Glogster, open educational resources (similar to creative commons ideas), and other technologies we’ve talked about. The presentation will be available within a couple of days at http://education.byu.edu/media/. Check it out, and learn about high school online learning, open and free educational resources, and voicethreads. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll be teaching for the open high school. If you’re interested in becoming a better blogger, there’s a conference in Sandy about that coming up. It’s not education-focused, but if you like blogging, you might find it useful. I wanted to address some copyright questions from the online section’s voicethread this last week. There may be more questions on people’s blogs that I’ll address as I do some grading this week. Great questions so far! Realize that I’m learning about this too. As with all things legal, copyright law is sometimes tough to comprehend. I learn more each semester as students as me questions! 1. It just seems odd to me that we may not be able to post a song on the Internet that is played on the radio all the time. So radio stations buy the coprights to the songs before they air them on thier stations? Answer: Yes, radio stations pay a fee for how often they will play a song. That’s a major source of income for music artists. Even Internet Radio stations must pay a fee, although how much that fee should be has been debated in recent court cases. If the music industry won the right to be reimbursed as much as they want, Pandora would probably cease to exist (at least for free). 2. Are youtube clips free game to use or is that against copyright laws too? Answer: Youtube clips are fine unless they were put on there illegally. If Person X puts a copyrighted song or TV show episode on Youtube, you are not allowed to then distribute it farther. However, if it’s on Youtube as less than 10% of the original (sometimes you’ll see clips from TV shows, but not the whole show), or if it sells ads to the song being played, then you’re ok. 3. In the junior high I observed at the teacher was showing all of “The Boy in Striped Pajamas.” It is an educational and popular movie. Is that against copyright laws? Answer: You CANNOT use copyrighted videos in class in their entirety for non-educational purposes. So, for example, showing a Disney film after a major Math test as a reward for students is NOT educational. That’s for the purpose of reward or entertainment, and is not fair use. However, you CAN show a full-length video in class if it IS for educational use. So showing a video in a foreign language that you are learning is fine. Also, showing a whole documentary in history class if fine, as long as you (or whoever you got it from) purchased the documentary. You CANNOT record something off of TV with a VCR or DVD recorder and then show it. Well, actually you can, but only for 10 days. After that, you need to purchase the episode or write the producer for permission. For more information, I found these links useful. Here and here. Notice question #6 below, which talks about educational videos. 4. Can I play a song in class? Answer: I think playing a song is probably all right—it’s still less than 10% of the album, in my opinion. Also, if you’re using the song for educational and not entertainment purposes, then you’re fine (see the above discussion on videos). 5. What does this mean for the Internet? Answer: This is the key difference. You have more lee-way in class where students can’t copy and redistribute the material. But be especially careful about posting things on the Internet for millions to see and download. You should only put things on the Internet that are less than 10% of the original, pays for itself through advertising (such as on YouTube, when there is advertising for the songs being played), or when you have permission from the original creator. Or just use creative commons media! 6. Does it have to meet each of the Fair Use guidelines or only one of those guidelines? For instance could a teacher show all of an educational film or only 10% of it? Answer: Typically, it needs to meet all of the Fair Use guidelines. Many educational videos (such as Bill Nye, I’ve been told) have granted greater privileges to teachers, for up to 3 years perhaps, to use recorded copies of their videos. So then Fair Use wouldn’t apply because permission is already granted. But if you aren’t sure if permission is granted, Fair Use allows you to use the video in class if you purchase a legal copy of the program. Finally, I promised I would embed the Fair-y Use video from Youtube. Enjoy!
If you can’t get enough of IPT286 [smile Out of curiosity. If you could request a presentation or workshop on any topic at this conference, what would you ask for? A few thoughts from students in the face-to-face class! Josh shared a reflection on how useful (or not) Buzz updates have been so far. His comments are equally true of other social network (PLN) updates in sites such as Twitter and Facebook. My thoughts are that there is a lot of “stuff” already on the Internet that sucks away our time. Personally, I think we should try to make our social networks more useful by personally posting things that would be useful to our friends. Relevant, interesting, and funny updates about our family can be useful; as can posting links to articles or websites that we think are good. But if we post too much irrelevant chatter, eventually technologies become more useless than useful. Just think of email. It used to be really useful. Now some people hardly use it because their inboxes are mostly filled with listservs and spam. I guess what I’m trying to say is that PLN technologies, like Twitter and Buzz, CAN are only as useful as you and the people in your network make them. They can be really useful if you post useful things to your peers, and they post useful things back. Sometimes hiding someone’s updates to keep your news feed clean and useful is something you just gotta do. What do you think? Sometimes a person in our class will have a good idea for how to apply a technology to a particular subject area, and then I like to ask them to elaborate on the idea in a blog post. Marissa had some ideas in Voicethread about using blogging or performing arts, and just posted a more extensive post on her blog about it. Katie had some good insights into the importance of inquiry in education, and how technology might help with this. Romney pointed to a good website for professional tutorials on a wide range of software tools. This company is very well respected. It’s a good way to get up to speed on a technology quickly. Romney also posted a neat video he created with his team for a competition. The video is about the importance of sponsoring children financially in developing countries. Great work! If you like it, be sure to vote for him in the competition. Some of you have probably noticed the Google Buzz feature that I blogged about the other day. You might have also noticed how annoying it is to have Buzz updates show up in your inbox. If you want to better keep Buzz separate from your email, this article shows you how. As far as using Buzz for teaching goes, you could create different groups of Gmail contacts to keep your students separate from other contacts, and then post Buzz updates specifically to your student group. Or you could create a colleague group too with the other teachers at your school, and again post Buzz updates specific to your colleagues that your other contacts wouldn’t see. It’s integrated with Google Reader, so it’d be an easy way to share stuff you read in Google reader with your teacher friends. A few common Google Sites questions I wanted to make everyone aware of. I’ve been asked how to embed the Goodreads widget into Google Sites. You do it by creating a new page, inserting the embed gadget (the same one you use to embed anything else–it’s a “featured” gadget), and then paste in the code from Goodreads. I have created a quick tutorial that is on the class website assignment page that shows you how to do this. Don’t forget to then link to your Goodreads page (or any extra pages you create) in your website sidebar or I won’t know it exists! It’d be cool to embed the Goodreads widget directly into the sidebar of your website, but Google hasn’t made this very easy. If someone figures out how to do that, let me know, and I’ll share the information with everyone else. I can’t remember if I talked in the voicethread (for the online students) about why I’m asking you to do a website AND a blog. Steve posted a nice thought on his blog about how he saw the difference. In a nutshell, these two tools are similar, but they each do something different better than the other. If you want students to be able to interact more easily with your website and leave comments, a blog is better. If you want to be able to upload information often—perhaps every day—then a blog is easier. If you want a static (non-changing) website where you can post information for your students and have it look nice/professional and stay there all semester, than a website is better. Yes, you can have a blog in Google Sites, and you can morph blogger to create extra pages that could be your website pages. But in their core, these two tools are different and are built for different purposes. I wanted you to learn both so you could better choose which you might use as a teacher. (A whole other option is to use a wiki to create a website, which also has its own purposes. We’ll talk more about that later in the semester). Just a quick note, because sometimes new bloggers forget about this—but be sure to check the comments left on your blog. Danny and I occasionally leave feedback on your assignments or just reply to questions or thoughts you have by leaving comments on your blog. If you want comments automatically emailed to you (that’s what I do), go to Settings > comments > Comment Notification Email |
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. The best source on campus is the Copyright Office in the library, and you can always ask them questions. But I’ll do my best to give some answers:
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