DTL- Be Legal, Be Fair Copyright Reflection

Your students writing is copyrighted

   Before this module, I didn't think too much about copyright.  When I was in college, I often took a phrase or a quote out of a book that I was using for a report and changed a few of the words to make sure I wasn't plagiarizing but I have not realized that is not enough.  Doing this still can be plagiarism because it still may resemble what the original author posted too closely.  If I didn't understand something or didn't know how to put it in my own words, I should have done more research before finishing my report
   I often took pictures right off of websites and Google images.  I wasn't ever sure if it was okay, since I was a teacher, but now I understand the laws better.  I now know that there are MANY resources on the internet to get media to support what you would like to to do for free.  Since reading about copyright, I have went back into some of my previous blogs and removed pictures and added images I found through the Creative Commons website.
    Now when I post images to my blogs, I make sure I go to Creative Commons website to obtain pictures to use in my blog.  I don't want to infringe on anyones work.
    I am thinking about using plagiarism checkers with my students when we read informational text and do a writing prompt on what we read.  They often take words right out of the book or passage that we read when trying to write what they learned.  I will have to teach them what they are doing when they do they, show them how the authors writing compares to what they wrote, and why we should change it.  I think the plagiarism checker tools may be more useful for my students in 4th and 5th grade since they do more research projects in those grade levels and beyond