Unit 5 Copyright

1. Does your school district have a Copyright Policy? 
What we have is pretty limited.  There is mention of copyright in the student handbook and then it was also briefly covered in the internet use policy that all staff had to sign off on.  With that said, there is very little in regards to specifics about copyright and it certainly didn't go into great detail.

2. Does the Copyright Policy need to be updated to reflect technology issues?
The fact that it was mentioned in the internet use form certainly signals an understanding by the district that technology is one of the areas where copyright infringment is probably the most likely (and hardest to police I would suspect).  With that said, there is nothing in regards to specifics that address technology or the potential copyright violations that could occur.

3. Does your school district follow copyright laws?
I would certainly like to think we do!  With that said, policing and supervising the office copier is definitely one of my very low priorities throughout the course of the work day.  I do feel that our staff understands copyright restrictions and that our administration does a decent job of supporting those laws and doesn't promote breaking them.

4. What are your feelings about copyright laws?
Well obviously I understand the importance of the laws and certainly realize that, just like any other property, intellectual property should be valued and protected.  It does, at times, get to be a little gray though.  For example, two of our schools were a part of the Reading First grant and, with money through the grant, we bought copies of lesson maps for teachers to use when implementing their reading lessons.  The lesson maps are very structured tools that assist teachers in using the core textbook to plan high quality lessons that meet all of the Big 5 areas of reading instruction.  Many teachers took the high frequency words listed in the template and turned them into a smart board lesson which they created.  According to the copyright laws, those smartboard lessons could not be shared with teachers from the buildings that did not have the lesson maps, even though they were created by the teacher.  That seems a little extreme to me as I'm not sure a list of words (especially if they are put into a different order) qualify as intellectual property.  With that said, I'm not a lawyer and kind of like my job (and freedom) so we purchased the lesson maps for the other two schools.  :-)