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What can a teacher do on a wiki or blog?

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These scenarios involve teachers uploading text, images, broadcasts, videos and music onto a blog or wiki. Uploading such material onto a blog or wiki involves two copyright activities; copying and communicating material.  ‘Communication’ of copyright material occurs where content is made available online.

There are special statutory licences and education exceptions in the Copyright Act which enable teachers to copy and communicate material on a wiki or blog. Students rely on different provisions known as ‘fair dealing exceptions’ when copying and communicating material for class and homework tasks.

Scenario 1: Uploading Student Works

John, a primary school teacher, posts samples of student work on the class blog each week. This includes:

  • scanned drawings
  • stop frame animation videos (created by the students)
  • writing assignments copied from the students own blogs.

John publishes the blog to the public internet so that parents of the students, as well as the community generally, can see the work that the students have been doing through the term.

Scenario 2: Making a Podcast

Tracey, a year nine math teacher, creates a podcast for her math students using scanned images from a year nine math textbook.

Tracey creates a class blog and uploads the podcast to the blog for her students to access at home when completing their homework.

Scenario 3: Recording a Broadcast  

Brian, a year 11 English teacher, records a documentary from The National Geographic channel for his students.

He later stumbles across the National Geographic website and copies several paragraphs from the website. Brian uploads the documentary and text onto the class wiki.

Brian instructs his students to watch the documentary and read the paragraphs for homework.

Scenario 4: Making an Audio Book

Henry, a year one teacher, thought it would be a great idea to provide an audio version of the book “Creatures in the Night” for his students to listen to at home when practicing reading. 

Henry has created a class blog and thought he would upload the audio book onto the class blog. Henry has tried to find the audio book of 'Creatures in the Night'. It is not commercially available for purchase anywhere.

Henry decides to create an audio book by recording himself narrate the book and upload the recording onto class blog.



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