Tech Tools for Teachers

Who owns your work

If you produce any part of your work during the work day or while using any school-owne resources (e.g. computers or software), your school district retains the rights to your work. How long and the terms of the license depends on school policy. You may be able share the rights and license work as creative commons.

Which license to use

It is highly recommended - and required if you used others’ creative commons material in your work - that you also license your work with a Creative Commons license. These licenses allow you to retain your rights to the work, while making it easy for others to use your work, following the parameters you set.

If you are licensing a work owned by your employer, usually you may not allow commercial use of your work, but may choose whether others may modify your work or not. It is also recommend to require “share-alike”, which requires people who use your work to also use a creative commons license. For more license options, see Creative Common Licenses.

If you include in your work materials that are copyrighted by others, such materials must be copyrighted under a creative commons license or fall under fair use.

Adding a Copyright Notice

The simplest method for adding a copyright to your work is adding a line of text with the word “Copyright”, the year the work was created, and you name; if you authored the material while at work, you must also at “Orono Public Schools”.

For example: Copyright 2011 Jane Doe / Orono Public Schools.

If you choose to use a Creative Commons license, you can get the license wording and/or embed code from Creative Common’s License Chooser.

For example: Copyright Guide for Teachers by Caitlin Cahill / Orono Public Schools is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you get stuck on any task, please post your questions to the Discussion Forum.