Cyberbullying Brochure

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  • Hello,

    I am having my seventh grade students create a cyberbullying brochure. Their task is to research (with sources I provide) and create a brochure with information they have found.

    I am assuming that the students will need to cite all of the sources used to create the brochure. Does the citation information need to be included on the brochure? Or can it be on a separate piece of paper? What about pictures? Can they use any photos found on the Internet? If so do they also need to be cited on the brochure? On a separate piece of paper? I know the separate piece of paper doesn't seem to make sense but I suggest it because I don't plan on reproducing the brochures to give to others. The students are only handing them in to me to be graded.

    However if in the future if I did select the best brochure to be copied and distributed to all students in the school would that make a difference?

    Thanks in advance!
  • The first point to clarify is that there is a different between copyright infringement and plagiarism. The sources need to be cited at the point of use (in the brochure), but how the citations are formatted and where they appear is a matter of style. You may want to consult a popular citation manual such as Turabian for tips on how to cite sources.

    Including other people's work in the brochure could be copyright infringement under certain circumstances and could be fair use (which is an exception to the copyright owner's rights) in others. Brochures turned in to you with no further distribtution might fall under fair use. But once they are distributed more widely (e.g., to all students in school) your Fair Use evaluation would need to change and the risk of infringement goes up.

    To do a Fair Use evaluation, you may find it helpful to consult the popular Fair Use Checklist provided by the Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office:
    http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-checklist/
  • I agree, but would like to add that I think that including images may be especially problematic, especially if the brochures go beyond the classroom. Generally, when you include text, you include a small portion, but with images you usually need to use the whole items for them to be useful or effective. If your students are grabbing images from the internet, I would encourage searching for images with creative commons or other free licensing. (I believe this is available in most advanced image searches: it's available in Google and Flickr.) This could have the added bonus of providing a learning moment about searching and rights! Alternatively, you may find free clipart within your software package or in your library.

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