Taking imagaes off the internet

[D. Herzer]

My 7th grade daughter brings home an assignment from school where they are to write a paper that is to include pictures. The instructions are to use pictures from the computer only, no hand drawn, or cut out from a magazine. It must be printed out on one sheet of paper so they have to get the images from a website and print them out for the assignment. Now I know this might sound petty but it really gets to me that a teacher asks students to take pictures from websites and print them out.

So am I just overreacting or does anyone else find this bothersome.

David

[polarbare]

Yes, it's definitely bothersome. I'd talk to the teacher about incorporating respecting copyright into her assignment if they aren't already. For educational use many things fall under fair use, but the teacher should be explaining that as part of the assignment.

[amfoto1]

Yes, there are fair use exceptions for usage of images in educational ways, so this is likely not a violation of copyright. Heck, I've used prints of well known images in college papers about photography (long before the Internet existed and the closest thing we had to a computer was a caluculator).

However, I agree it would be great if the teacher would take the time to go into what copyright is and why it's not okay to take images off the Internet for their own use, without permission. Kids growing up with the Internet are convinced that anything they find there is free for the taking. It's not good for a teacher to reinforce that and not spend a little time teaching the youngsters to respect other peoples' property.

[MJPhotos24]

Looking back it was the same thing but cutting it out of the paper and just starting with internet images. They use it freely because you can with learning purposes so kids think it's free to do what they want, it would be great if a teacher actually explained that to them!

[LBaldwin]

Now, this does fall under fair use for education. But depending on the age of the student are they supposed to list their information sources at the bottom of the project?

I school, book reports, weekely papers etc had to state what each inormation source and where you found it...