Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright Protection and Education
by Branka Lamza
Did you know that copyright in a work belongs to its
author by the mere action of creation of the work?
According to the European copyright law, only the
author has the exclusive right to do with his
copyrighted work and the benefits deriving from it
whatever he likes.
Every time we decide to create a presentation, a
video or a slideshow, it is important to check
whether the text, music, or photographs we intend
to use are copyrighted. In the eTwinning project
“Safe Internet: A Bridge Between Us” we wanted to
develop pupils’ awareness of the notion of
copyright. This does not mean detailed analysis of
legal matters: in a nutshell, pupils need to be
taught from their young age that taking other
people’s credits for creation of any literary, musical
or artistic work is wrong.
The project was founded in November 2013 by
Evaggelia Kontopidi (Greece) and Liz Allton (United
Kingdom). The main aim set by the founders was
“to encourage the good use of the Internet and
computers, promote awareness of Internet safety
and create a better Internet together". One of the
goals was also to support Safer Internet Day 2014.
Every year in February my colleague Iva Naranđa,
an IT teacher, and I traditionally mark this day by
various activities with our pupils, aged 10-14. We
organize integrated classes of English and IT which
typically consist of two 45 minute lessons and
include: introducing and expanding vocabulary of
English related to the topic and applying this
knowledge using Web 2.0 tools. Pupils create
presentations (Prezi, Emaze), cartoons, comics
(Pixton, Tondoo), animated videos (Go!Animate), estories (StoryBird), audio messages with speaking
characters (Voki), quizzes and games (Zondle,
ProProfs, Kubbu).
When we found out about the project “Safe
Internet: A Bridge Between Us” we thought that
joining in would be a good idea since all our
activities could be easily integrated into it. What is
more, the project offered our pupils a possibility to
find out about internet safety policies in other
countries as well as to compare their digital habits
to the ones of their peers abroad.
So, we were very happy to be accepted in such a
project. For a start we organized a Skype session,
which included a quiz with the Greek team led by
the project founder Evaggelia Kontopidi. The pupils
were to prepare questions on internet safety for the
other team. Skype sessions are always fun for our
pupils – they have a chance to get to know each
other, and a set of prepared “true/false” questions
is an excellent way to check general knowledge on
the theme and encourage pupils to develop
communication with the other team.
One of the topics we tackled in our quiz was
copyright. This was also the topic of our following
integrated classes of English and IT organized for
Safer Internet Day 2014.
The pupils – our 8th graders, aged 14 – were
shown a presentation on the Croatian copyright
law, which largely complies with the copyright law
of the other EU member countries. Let me cite the
articles we concentrated on:
Copyright - rights of authors in respect of their
works in the literary, scientific and artistic domains.
Copyright shall belong, by its nature, to a natural
person who has created a copyright work.
The author has the exclusive right to do with his
copyright work and the benefits deriving from it
whatever he likes, and not to allow any other
person to do the same.
The author may allow another person to use a
copyright work.
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