Copyright

It is critical to teach students that text and graphics harvested from the Web are not necessarily part of the public domain, but are somebody's property. As such, the material belongs to the creator and remains so unless clearly indicated otherwise. Students must learn how to obtain permission to use copyrighted material and properly credit others' intellectual property.

Copyright Permission and Fair Use

Student's Permission Template
David Warlick created useful form-letter templates for both students and teachers wishing to use harvested Internet resources in class projects and presentations.

Art Rights and Wrongs
This award-winning ThinkQuest site was created by a class of 5th and 6th graders from Queens, NY. It teaches fair use of art and images by modeling correct practice, explaining how to obtain permission to use copyrighted material, and providing information on trademarks, licenses, and cyber counterfeits.

District Copyright and Web Publishing
This Bellingham Public Schools site offers teachers and students clear guidance on republishing Internet text and graphics, models high standards for district policy, and offers further resources on the issue of Internet copyright.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: Copyright Resources
This Discovery Channel site provides links to permission forms and sites with valuable guidance to educators on correct use of intellectual property (copyright, plagiarism, citing sources, bibliographies, etc.).

Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom, on the Internet, and the World Wide Web
This University of Maryland site explains fair use of Web text, images, audio, and video in lay terms, and offers guidance on using copyrighted materials for educational multimedia.

Copyright Information for Educators
This University of Washington site provides an exhaustive list of resources on key copyright issues for educators.

ALA: Copyright Issues
This American Library Association site is a useful source for information on copyright news, legislation, articles, court cases, and digital-age issues.

Bibliographic Citation Tools

SLATE Citation Machine
This Landmark Project site features a simple tool that students and teachers can use to create bibliographic citations for classroom projects.

Easybib.com
This site provides a free user-friendly tool for compiling a correctly-formatted bibliography.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: Ready Reference and Library-Related Resources
This Discovery Channel site contains resources for various citation formats, including grade-specific bibliographic citation templates for elementary students.

Noodle Tools
This site offers a suite of interactive free and fee-based tools to help people with online research. "Quick Cite" is a free tool that generates an MLA-style citation for a single source (in simplified version for younger students).