The Copyright Alliance Education Foundation has worked in partnership over the past year with Young Minds Inspired and its panel of educator advisors to develop materials for teachers about copyright and the classroom.

The goal: to help teachers navigate the topic of copyright and provide some general top-level information they might find useful.

These materials were sent to educators in select states during the past week and we have been excited by the enthusiastic response.

A message yesterday from a teacher in Michigan says:

“I’ve just spent the past hour looking through the Copyright Alliance website. What an excellent resource with quality content where teachers can learn alongside students and teach the critical skills and copyright knowledge that is sorely lacking in our schools today. Thank you for compiling these resources and making them freely available to everyone…they will be used over and over again in our school district.”

This is encouraging feedback. But we also know there is much more to be done.

The needs and questions educators have on this topic vary dramatically. One teacher might want to understand how to appropriately use a portion of a copyrighted work in a lesson plan. Instructors in creative subject areas – like our partners at West Potomac Academy in Fairfax County, VA – have questions about the creation of new copyrighted works by students for class projects.

At the same time, more and more states are identifying digital citizenship and online ethics as required pieces of schools’ overall technology education requirements.

This is a good thing. Students in today’s classrooms will benefit from society’s ongoing appreciation for the principle of copyright – either as a consumer of creative works, or as creators themselves.

The Foundation intends for our resources to be dynamic – with ongoing updates, additional FAQs and definitions – added over time as we hear feedback and suggestions from educators.

Information can always be improved upon, and we welcome constructive comments. We are gratified to have heard already from many teachers who have been looking for materials such as these to help them decipher this important issue.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 2:34 pm by Gayle Osterberg and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.