Communicate: Laws of Communication 1.1.2

Laws of Communication 1.1.2

To avoid violating FERPA guidelines in online communication, teachers would need to call a parent to share grade information and not email the grade to them or share that grade information to anyone else.  If someone has expressed a desire to know the student grade, the teacher could encourage them to go talk with the student's parent.  This often happens in the case of recreational sports coaches who are trying to be supportive of the child's education and are serving in the capacity of mentor and role model as well as coach.

I play videos about copyright infringement and digital property to the students at the beginning of the year, and remind them about the law every time that we step into a creative process (which is just about  daily). My students are required to sign acceptable use policies that are carefully updated every year. I give them resources that come from creative commons sites and make them practice by citing the source.  We use "EasyBib" for everything.  EasyBib is a bibliography generator.  There are many sources that have already been referenced in the service and often, students need to enter the most basic information for a list of choices to appear.   If the correct source is present, the student clicks on the link and the information is populated to a file that can be downloaded.  If there is no correct source, the student then completes the rest of the entries by hand.  GCPS pays for the service for all students and teachers, and a free version is available here: http://www.easybib.com/  Even a flip book project has to have sources printed from EasyBib that pare printed out and glued to the back.  Between the lessons about respecting the property of others, the creative commons websites that I provide for them and the actions of having to cite every source they use, we stay pretty well within the boundary as established by the law.

 Copyright protects the intellectual property of the owner.  Not all work, images, words, and graphics are copyrighted.  Permission can be asked and given to use copyrighted material and many people publish their material as creative commons with attribution request.  I do this with my photography: Ms. Salomon's Photo Collection (Creative Commons with attribution).