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TEACHING COPYRIGHT AND MEDIA LITERACY THROUGH STUDENT-PRODUCED DOCUMENTARIES
My students have a vast toolbox filled with their personal sources and software, our library materials, and the seemingly infinite supply of raw materials, open sources, and free software on the Web. Film and moving images are ubiquitous. Some students watch and create video blogs (vlogs). Most are watching YouTube videos and using videocentric social networks like Vimeo and Hulu to find music videos, humorous sketches, TV shows, news, and information for school projects and personal gratification. Students' broad exposure prepares them to become sophisticated media creators and consumers; they recognize various styles that are used in film and can apply a Ken Burns or Comedy Central style to their iMovie projects. Their multimedia class projects offer opportunities for me to develop new information literacy skills since their media literacy goes hand in hand with the library's information literacy curriculum. Students need to learn to apply critical thinking skills to marketing videos, advertisements, live performance and music videos, mocumentaries and documentaries, and narrative films of all types.
At the Urban School of San Francisco, an independent high school where I am the librarian, each student has a laptop equipped with software including iMovie and iStopmotion. Some teachers encourage or even require the use of these tools to create projects. I have found that these videobased projects are a great place to teach students about image, video, and audio copyright issues.
A major class project in Antony Reyes's Spanish 3B class composed of sophomores and juniors involves creating a video. Students are asked to research the life of Che Guevara and create a seven- to tenminute documentary in the style of Ken Burns. They meet in groups that look at various segments of Guevara's life - his motorcycle journey through...