Running head: TEACHER SCENARIO ASSIGNMENT 1

Teacher Scenario Assignment

Pia L. Bowes

Grand Canyon University: TEC 516

Ruby Willey-Rendon, PhD

8/23/17
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Teacher Scenario Assignment

Teachers frequently use information from other sources to support their technology

integrated instruction. It is important to respect the rights of other creators when using their

information by citing them, as not giving all of creators credit is violating plagiarism standards

(TheVisualsCommunicationsGuy.com, 2014). The following paper contains the analysis of two

teacher scenarios, in which teachers violated either legal, ethical, or both legal and ethical

standards.

Teacher Scenarios

I chose to use the first two scenarios because those are the most likely issues which

would arise during my school year, as an early childhood teacher.

Scenario Number One

The teacher in the first scenario did something that many teachers do. She got images

from the internet and inserted them into her SMART Notebook lesson. It is not listed that

Rebecca has adjusted her search settings to “Creative Commons” only or adjusted the usage

rights to fit her needs, so the assumption would be that she did not (Stieben, 2014). By doing this

and assuming that the creators have not granted users rights to use these images, she created two

issues. The first is issue two, “inappropriate or illegal integration of materials, such as images,

movies, and videos in lessons and instruction.” Rebecca did not create these images herself, so

she has to get permission from their creators, otherwise she is illegally obtaining the images. As

Rebecca is not using these images for profit and is just pasting them into her SMART Notebook

lesson, a license which allows her to non-commercially reuse and share, but not modify the

images would make her lesson to be legally and ethically complete. If she was required to credit
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the author, those characteristics would make the license a “CC BY-NC-ND (CC Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)” license (Stieben, 2014). Rebecca also created issue nine,

“copyright versus public domain,” depending on the license surrounding the images. If the

images are public domain, that means that anyone can use them in any way and does not even

have to credit to the author (Stieben, 2014).

Copyright licenses have different restrictions, which means that depending on the

copyright restrictions, Rebecca may have to remove these images completely from her lesson, to

make it legally and ethically sound.

Scenario Number Two

In this scenario, Mary uses a movie in place of instruction, to catch up on some work.

This teacher’s actions also creates multiple technologically legal and ethical issues. First, though

she sent home permission slips, Mary allowed the students whose parents did not give

permission to remain in the classroom. The scenario does not explain whether the parents

explicitly stated, “No” or just did not return the slip signed. If the parents just did not sign, Mary

could call the parents to ask; however, if they said, “no,” Mary must remove the children from

the classroom. To leave the students in the classroom when parents expressed that they did not

want their children there is ethically wrong, and there may be private family reasons for the

children to not participate. Doing something without parental permission could also cause legal

ramifications. Second, this is would be “inappropriate sharing of resources” because the movie is

not integrated into instruction. Assuming that the movie has been legally purchased, Mary can

legally show the movie to students “in the course of face-to-face teaching activities” because she

is in the classroom (Frieden, n.d.). Ethically, she is getting paid for not providing instruction and

not watching the children, which is an issue. Yes, the teacher is completing report cards and not
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playing games on her phone, but students could be doing something to engage more than just

two senses.

This was not a lesson in which technology use could be fixed to deliver the lesson

ethically or legally because there was no planned instruction, it was being used as a reward. If

the teacher wanted to incorporate this movie into a lesson, she could play clips pertaining to

problem solving, and social skills. Mary could also use it as part of a science unit to identify and

make a list of the sea creatures, or during literacy as the information for retelling activity or

sequencing events in a story. Essentially, there are many things that Mary could do to use this

movie as a resource for an instructional activity, which would make it an ethically acceptable

lesson.

Conclusion

Teachers can create ethical and legal issues in the process of servicing their students.

Whether they are providing instruction or reporting progress, teachers can make an effort to be

more legally and ethically driven when integrating technology into their classrooms.
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References

Frieden, J. A. (n.d.). Issues of U.S. copyright low relating to the use of movies in the classroom.

Retrieved from http://www.teachwithmovies.org/copyright.html

Stieben, D. (2014, January 18). What is creative commons, and should you use it? Retrieved

from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/creative-commons-use/

TheVisualsCommunicationsGuy.com. (2014). Did I plagiarize? The types and severity of

plagiarism violations. [Infographic]. Retrieved from

http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Infographic_Did-I-

Plagiarize1.jpg