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Teaching Reading Skills With Movies
When teaching reading skills you usually assume it involves only written text such as a novel, magazine, or textbook. Many skills can be taught, however, using other forms of media.
Classrooms in Public Schools and Nonprofit Educational Institutions:
Rented or Purchased Movies May Be Played By Teachers Without a License
Section 110(1) of Title 17 of the United States Code grants a specific exemption from the copyright laws for:
performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in
the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit
educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to
instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other
audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images,
is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title,
and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason
to believe was not lawfully made ....
This means that no license from the copyright holder is required when a
teacher at a public school or non-profit educational institution uses a
lawfully purchased or rented copy of a movie in classroom instruction.
It doesn't matter who purchased or rented the film, so long as it was
legally obtained. The exemption is granted for "face-to-face" teaching
activities only. This means that the teacher (or a substitute teacher)
must be present. The exemption covers a "classroom or similar place
devoted to instruction." This gives teachers some flexibility. For
example, it is likely that a gymnasium used for large educational
presentations in which several classes are convened together would be
covered so long as a teacher presented the film. Note that remotely
accessing a film from a central memory storage facility is probably not
permitted. See 17 U.S.C. ยง 1201(a).
Kids love movies and they can be used to teach concepts such as character development, story sequence, main idea, and predicting. Here are some resources I've found that can be used with some current, popular movies.
Many of the resources above can also be accessed from Filmeducation.org. Film Education is a charity out of the UK that supports using films in education and creates some great resources that can be used with many current films.
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