A new licence is being developed to legitimise teachers’ use of published materials when creating digital resources, including scanned extracts from books, magazines and journals.
Learning and Teaching Scotland and the Copyright Licensing Agency are working on the licence, and want teachers to inform the process by completing a questionnaire.
The availability of the Scottish schools’ intranet - or Glow, as it has been renamed - from next year will make it possible for resources to be shared across Scotland. LTS is hopeful that a new licence can be introduced simultaneously to help teachers avoid the pitfalls of infringing intellectual property rights and copyright when using Glow.
Robert Dyer, CLA business development manager for education, said responses to the questionnaire would be “invaluable” in developing the licence. There is no indication of its cost.
A spokesman for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said: “If this licence allows teachers to build on the good job that they are already doing, it’s something to be welcomed, depending on cost.”
Glow will give teachers and pupils access to a huge collection of resources, much of which already exists but is not easily accessible. This will include content from the LTS online service, resources developed by different authorities, more than a million images - as diverse as cartoon characters, science equipment and musical instruments - and a large collection of photographs gathered by LTS.
The deadline for the questionnaire is October 27. It can be found at www.ltscotland.org.ukedresourcesdigitaluseofpublishedmaterialquestionnaire .asp
