wednesday

I went to a wonderful overview of the very, very confusing world of copyright and fair use. These standards, which sometimes conflict, are important for all educators to at least have a passing familiarity with. Educators are entitled to bend the copyright rules under established best practices known as “fair use.” With fair use guidelines, an educator can use limited segments of copyrighted information for instructional purposes. However, the amount of copyrighted material that can be used should be no more than 10% or 3 minutes, of the original media source. Likewise, attribution to the author or artist must be present. Obviously, this is a very brief, and incomplete, description of this very complicated policy—however, here are a few resources for more information: http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/

I think the most important guideline is that the media must be brought in for instructional purposes to match established curriculum. To play a song that you like for your students would not qualify, but to bring in a song from the ‘60s to illustrate social protest would qualify. Clarifying teacher, and student, use of media is a big goal for the instructional technology team for 2008-2009. Stay tuned. Mike

_ I learned about a few new websites that I thought were very helpful and great learning tools. http://googledocs.blogspot.com/ This will show how to use the google programs http://www.google.com/educators/index.html This site has so MANY teacher resources. They even have a chat room for teachers to share ideas. http://www.gliffy.com/ A site where you can make flow charts and much more http://www.jingproject.com/ Jing is where you can make videos for instruction. It copies your desktop. http://www.gcast.com/?nr=1&&s=51602171 You can pod cast on this site right off your cell or home phone.

(Thanks Heritage google doc crew & Mike Porter for sharing these sites with us)~ Carrie S. (Sandburg)

You're welcome--Mike. And a huge note of appreciation to Heidi and Diane for presenting Google Docs, a Web-based program, without the Internet. I heard many, many positive comments on your ability to make it "work" without it working. Mike