How copyright licences are helping teachers in the classroom

15 June 2015

How copyright licences are helping teachers in the classroom

This term, copyright conscious schools across New Zealand will be getting licensed: taking up annual licences to ensure their teaching staff can access the print, music and audio visual content they need to plan creative lessons and help students learn.

Operating without these licences can be risky. Teachers need to make sure they have permission to use content that is under copyright in their classrooms. Licences enable access, far beyond what is permitted by the Copyright Act.

Taupaki School in Henderson, Auckland is a copyright conscious school. Each year they take up all three copyright licences: a CLNZ licence for print, a OneMusic licence for music and a Screenrights licence for television and radio content.

Principal Stephen Lethbridge explains: “It’s an obvious decision for our school. We can access far more material – across a broad spectrum of media – and use it knowing we’re doing things legally. The licences give our teachers more freedom to be creative and we can also encourage our students to respect creativity, knowing that we’re doing the same.

“We want our students to think about their own creative ownership too. We aim to embed intellectual property education into our everyday teaching practice and having the correct licences is an important part of that.”

Year 7 and 8 teacher JJ Purton Jones agrees. “The licences help us to be more creative as teachers and to work with students on projects with mixed media elements. There are also some simple things, that classroom teachers might not often think about, that I wouldn’t be able to do if I were teaching at an unlicensed school.”

The school’s CLNZ print licence means that when JJ runs class poetry clinics she can provide copies of a poem in its entirety to students to help them understand types of poems and inspire them to write their own work. Without a licence she would only be able to provide students with copies of up to half of a poem.

ends

© Scoop Media