ALA Releases Copyright Lessons for School Librarians
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By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 02/25/2009
Copyright. Plagiarism. Fair Use. They’re all important issues in the classroom. But do you and your students really understand their true meaning?
A series of five lessons specifically designed for media specialists who teach students in grades six to eight is now available online—and they’re linked to the American Association of School Librarians’ (AASL) teaching guide for media specialists, the Standards for the 21st Century Learner.
Compiled by AASL, the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the updated lesson plans address timely topics in copyright education and, unlike many other lessons plans, provide a balanced approach to copyright by including issues such as fair use.
Using examples of collaborative teaching between classroom teachers and media specialists, the lessons are designed as flexible curriculum tools that can be integrated across subject areas and complement any information literacy program.
“The lessons are great because they cover all of the aspects of copyright,” says Carrie Russell, an SLJ columnist and ALA’s director of the program on public access to information.
The lessons are available for free on the ReadWriteThink Web site, which provides educators and students with access to practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
The lessons include: Exploring Plagiarism, Copyright, and Paraphrasing, which focuses on three parts: plagiarism, copyright and fair use, and helping students develop paraphrasing skills; Students as Creators: Exploring Copyright, in which students learn and use strategies for incorporating multimedia resources in their own works without violating copyright law; Students as Creators: Exploring Multimedia, which introduces students to the genre of multimedia presentations through a review and analysis of online presentations; Copyright Law: From Digital Reprints to Downloads, which looks at how and why copyright law has changed over time can help students better understand recent and current copyright disputes; and Technology and Copyright Law: A “Futurespective, a lesson in which students will research and report on several instances of how copyright law has adapted to encompass new technologies.
