The questions posed in this section of Communicate are important ones because knowledge of these topics will be what help us prevent breaking the law as an online teacher. It will be easiest to address these questions one at a time. How can one refrain from violating FERPA and TCPA guidelines in online communication? To avoid violating federal privacy laws, first all educators must be aware of the laws, what they state and what they mean. After 5 years with GAVS, I can say that they do a very good job ensuring that teachers know what they can and cannot do in terms of communicating within the law. I know that each year we take a course to help refresh us on the laws, as well, so it is not just an awareness, but a constant reminder to help us avoid becoming too comfortable with the communications that we send or receive. It is most important to remember that any type of personally identifying information is off limits, and any information regarding grades should not be shared. It is also always best to speak to your ILT if you are ever in doubt before you establish any type of communication- it is always better to be safe than sorry. What methods could be employed to verify that copyright is not being violated? As described in the content of Communication 1.2, there are programs out there designed to assist teachers in spotting plagiarism. Using the tools available to us is very important because other eyes on the work that we look at day in and day out will catch factors that we miss. As a Spanish teacher, I can attest that these sites have come a very long way. Not only will they compare the information submitted with anything on the web, but they will also compare the work to previous work submitted to them so that you can spot students attempting to use the work of others. Again, though, World Language has a unique problem and that is that students will take advantage of the easy step of writing what they would like to say in English and past it into a translating technology. This is much more difficult to spot, but with practice, it becomes easier. As a teacher, I simply tell the students that anything we have learned in a current or previous units is fair game but that I would not be doing my job if I allowed them to practice material beyond what we have learned since I know that they need to practice what they will be assessed over in the end of the course. We must practice to master any topic. I simply communicate that they need to redo assignments where they use grammatical structures beyond what we have learned in the course because they are not responsible for that material on the summative assessments. This has helped me decrease the amount of students using translating technologies as well as using another students' work or work found online! Does copyright require that all work, images, words, and graphics must be original?
Copyright laws differ depending on what type of license is purchased by the original author of the material. There are some items covered by Free Use laws, while other products will allow someone to, for example, just reproduce their image but only by giving the original author credit. It is important that we all understand how to tell what is available for our use and what we can simply reproduce, manipulate, change, share, and claim as ours. I believe that this type of information should be taught to students in today's society because they are constantly using work, images, words, and graphics from the internet. They need to understand how to properly give credit to author or how to tell if the information/product is off limits!
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