Ethical+Issues

Video Copyright Scenario
The first grade students and their teacher Mrs. Hill were working on a thematic unit on Native Americans. One student suggested she brought her Disney Pocahontas DVD to school. Mrs. Hill checked the school districts’ movie list and noticed Pocahontas was not on the list, so she told her student she could bring in the movie so the class could watch it on the Smartboard on Friday and have their pajama party they earned for good behavior at the same time. The librarian came in on Friday to drop off character of the month picture books into Mrs. Hill’s room when she saw the Disney movie playing onto the Smartboard. When the librarian asked Mrs. Hill about showing Pocahontas, Mrs. Hill replied it was their culminating activity for their Native American thematic unit. The librarian asked Mrs. Hill where the movie came from and she replied from one of her student’s home.

As a librarian, it is my role to gently remind Mrs. Hill of copyright infringements as well as the school district’s movie policy. The school district has a strict policy to only show videos that are on their large movie list. If a movie is not on the district’s movie list, then they strongly encourage teachers to look at Discovery Streaming. As a librarian I would help Mrs. Hill find Native American video clips off Discovery Streaming, as well as look to see if there are any Native American books presented in a movie format on BookFlixs, TumbleBook or Storyline Online.



Digital Plagiarism Scenario
The sixth graders were given a project to work on. They were to create a PowerPoint of their dream vacation. The project wanted the students to include airline prices, describe the hotels and include what the students would do when they reached their destination. Two partners were excited about this project and quickly got to work. They wanted to go to Miami so they Google searched Miami hotels and copied what their room accommodations would have as well as copied pictures of their rooms. They simply pasted this information onto a slide before moving on to find information about the Miami Heat basketball game and doing the same copy and pasting. The librarian strolled over to help refocus these excited students and to see what their PowerPoint had so far. She noticed the pictures, information, colorful background, and different types of font. But, what she did not see was citation.

The librarian had asked the students if they knew how to cite their information. They sheepishly told her they did, but it was too hard. It was way more fun to look up the information. The librarian showed them easybib.com and how easy it was to cite information. Next, she showed these students how easy it was to copy this created citation and where to put the information into their PowerPoint. She gently reminded the students it was not right to take someone else’s work and claim it as their own. The librarian later spoke with the teacher about presenting easybib.com to the whole class.