Exploring Copyrights and Wrongs

 In this video from The Teaching Channel, high school teacher Nichole Niebur addresses the issue of copyrights with her class in different ways: she defines vocab specific to the topic, has them define them in their own words, shows a slideshow with important bullet points about the topic, and then gives them an activity. The activity involves a real-life situation where advertisers are asked to choose from a series of pictures for a billboard advertisement for becoming vegetarian. The students work in groups to decide which picture is best, and must consider who took the picture in their decision. After the groups have discussed, the teacher explains that one picture of meat is maybe not the best choice because it was taken by a chef, and that chef would not want a picture of their creative dish used for an advertisement about becoming vegetarian.

I think Nichole did a very thorough job of getting the students to think about what they find online as someone’s creative work, and using where it came from to consider whether they should use it or not. As a music teacher, I would like to apply this lesson to my classroom, because music is stolen so often. I think the students would really connect to the music as being someone’s creative work that they wouldn’t want to be stolen or used in a way they would not want, because the students are creative musicians themselves. In addition to spending a day teaching a lesson like this towards the beginning of the year, I would want to make sure to bring back this topic every time the students use someone else’s work in a presentation or anything, to reinforce the importance of properly crediting creatives.