{"id":4111,"date":"2026-10-07T11:42:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T18:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swank.com\/k12\/?p=4111"},"modified":"2026-10-08T12:26:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:26:21","slug":"before-you-press-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swank.com\/k12\/blog\/before-you-press-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Before You Press Play&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Does Your School Pass the Copyright Test?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From reward days and family movie nights to classroom instruction and after-school programs, movies play an important role in K\u201312 education. However, many educators are surprised to learn that showing a movie at school is not automatically covered by classroom use exemptions. Depending on how, why, and where a film is shown, a public performance license may be required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this on-demand webinar, Swank experts explore the fundamentals of movie copyright compliance for schools, including the face-to-face teaching exemption, common situations that require movie licensing, and practical ways schools can reduce uncertainty when using films on campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You&#8217;ll also learn how educational streaming platforms can support instructional movie use by giving teachers access to curriculum-aligned content, lesson-planning tools, and flexible viewing options designed for today&#8217;s classrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What You&#8217;ll Learn<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The difference between instructional and entertainment-based movie use<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When a public performance license for schools may be required<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Common school activities that often require movie licensing, including reward days, family events, clubs, and fundraisers<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>How the face-to-face teaching exemption applies to classroom movie use<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Best practices for maintaining copyright compliance in K\u201312 schools<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>How educational streaming supports lesson planning, assignments, and student access to video content<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Strategies for balancing teacher access with district policies and administrative oversight<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Watch now to gain a clearer understanding of school movie licensing, copyright requirements, and educational streaming, and learn how your school can use video confidently while supporting both compliance and student engagement..<\/p>\n\n\n\t<section class=\"content-video \">\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t<div class=\"st-xl sb-xl\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t<article class=\"card\" data-video-type='wistia' data-video-id='rcdbj4uo7f'>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"card-thumbnail\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"card-play\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<svg width=\"46\" height=\"46\" viewbox=\"0 0 46 46\" fill=\"none\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<path d=\"M0 4C0 1.79086 1.79086 0 4 0H42C44.2091 0 46 1.79086 46 4V42C46 44.2091 44.2091 46 42 46H4C1.79086 46 0 44.2091 0 42V4Z\" fill=\"#333A49\"\/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<path d=\"M12 36V10L38 22.7547L12 36Z\" fill=\"white\"\/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t<img width=\"1024\" height=\"447\" src=\"https:\/\/k12.swank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/licensing-webinar-web-image-1024x447.jpg\" class=\"object-cover\" alt=\"Before You Press Play: Does Your School Pass the Copyright Test?\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/k12.swank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/licensing-webinar-web-image-1024x447.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/k12.swank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/licensing-webinar-web-image-300x131.jpg 300w, https:\/\/k12.swank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/licensing-webinar-web-image-768x335.jpg 768w, https:\/\/k12.swank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/licensing-webinar-web-image.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"sr-only\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOkay, well good afternoon everybody and welcome to today&#8217;s webinar. Before you press play, does your school pass the copyright test? We are very excited for this conversation as we are every year when we lead a similar version of this or when we go visit school districts and talk through similar concepts. But as I&#8217;m sure that you can imagine, if you know anything about Swank, we are certainly passionate about the conversation regarding copyright. Is it something that we get to live on a very regular basis. And goal today is to help bring some of that passion out to all of you if at all possible. Couple of quick housekeeping items before we get started. Number one, we&#8217;re expecting as usual a very large audience for today&#8217;s conversation. Because of that, we&#8217;re gonna go ahead and keep phone lines on mute. I I say for the time being, but we&#8217;ll probably end up keeping them on mute the entire time just because anticipate that anything else would get rather congested if we walk through this. So, but the goal of this conversation is to be not only interactive but also bidirectional. If you&#8217;re not familiar with the Wistia interface, which is what we&#8217;re using here on your menu bar on the right hand side, you should see the ability to select Q and A. This is where the interaction hopefully can come in at least from a question and answer standpoint. If you want to submit a question either as we&#8217;re talking or during the Q and A phase at the end, we welcome you to do so. We will be monitoring those throughout the conversation and we&#8217;ll try and surface them as the questions come in. If for some reason we miss it as the questions come in, we always leave time at the end for a Q and A where we can unpack all of those items we didn&#8217;t have time to get to as we were going through. But again, the goal is to tie those back to the conversation in the moment. So we&#8217;ll keep a pretty close eye on that and see if we can make sure we raise those as they come up. We&#8217;re also gonna do some fun interaction, kind of test everybody&#8217;s knowledge on copyright especially as it relates to schools today. So there&#8217;s a poll section over there. I believe that section is gonna as we launch the poll should just initiate, you should see it. But if not, keep an eye on that polls icon on the right hand side of your menu as well and we&#8217;ll make sure that we get you some information and test your copyright knowledge as it relates to movies in schools. Additionally, all of this will be recorded. So at the end of it, will be sent a recording. Normally these go out same day every now and again, they can take up twenty four hours. So bear with us. If you don&#8217;t have it right away, know that it is coming. The expectation is that you&#8217;re certainly more than welcome to either review this throughout your weekend if you&#8217;re looking to just continue your investigation on copyright or share it with colleagues perhaps at your school, re review certain items of it, more than welcome to. But we&#8217;ll be sending that out to everybody at the conclusion of it. From an introduction standpoint, my name is Brian Edwards. I&#8217;ve been here with Swank Motion Pictures for the last decade, spending a lot of my time working within copyright, working with our studio partners related to their IP. And then also working with our IT group on development of the streaming platform and a bunch of these streaming functionality that we hope to at least show towards the end of this copyright conversation today. But I get a bit of a mix of all of those things in my day and I am joined here by my friends and colleagues Seth and Sydney and I&#8217;ll let them go ahead and introduce themselves. Awesome. Alright. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Seth Baycock. I&#8217;m our sales manager for the K-twelve team as well as our public library team. I&#8217;ve working in movie licensing, for quite a few years now and I work really closely with our sales team as well as our, renewal team to make sure that we keep our schools licensed. We make sure everybody&#8217;s compliant and we help with, understanding the license and any of actual resources that come along with that as well. And then my name is Sydney. I work closely with hundreds of schools every week, really deep dive on the copyright side, as well as like kind of Seth mentioned some of the other resources and things that we&#8217;re able to offer which we&#8217;re excited to talk about you with you today. We are so jumping right into this. So as a quick agenda on expectations for today, we&#8217;re going go into copyright and what that means for schools. Again, especially as it relates to movies, a lot of these same concepts apply to other resources like music in schools. Music is certainly not our expertise, but a lot of it is applicable over there. So our focus will be movies, but there may be some element of this that you can take into some other areas. We&#8217;re also gonna go through this interaction piece that we call, do I need a license for that? Test some of your skills on this. As we go through it, it will be anonymous. There is not actually a test or a score or a rating. We will not call attention to anyone if you end up getting any of these wrong. They&#8217;re meant to be fun and educational at the same time. We will also then walk through what licensing options look like for schools and what licensing options are available. Some fall programming right now seems to be the time of year where movies are shown the most in schools, whether it be back to school movie nights or we have the holiday season coming up. Movies just seem to be something that is leveraged quite a bit, either kind of an event based way to engage your school community or in the classroom to engage students. We&#8217;re going to talk through both of those scenarios as we go through this conversation. And then again, mentioned we&#8217;ll introduce the Swank streaming platform and how this kind of ties into the license, how it ties into some of the exceptions to copyright licensing. And then again, we&#8217;ll leave time at the end for Q and A. So diving right in, Copyright Act 1976, I assure you won&#8217;t spend too much time on this. There&#8217;s a lot of information out there, but it does set a baseline for the conversation today. Basically, this says that anytime you show a movie in a public space, so outside of your home, you need public performance licensing in place in order to do so unless you have permission from the copyright owner. In most cases, contacting a movie studio or contacting the creator of a film is unrealistic for most people. So in general, having a public performance license is required for showing a movie in a public setting and that does include K-twelve schools. There are exceptions to this as it relates to K-twelve schools though. Some of them are at least kind of go to what feels like everybody relies on as fair use. Fair use is not the only indication of it that there is an exception to public performance licensing being required. The TEACH Act is one that deals a lot in like online learning where there are some exceptions. But the one that I think applies the most, the one that we end up in the most conversations about is the face to face teaching exemption, which is a section one ten of copyright law. And face to face teaching exemption is great because it really spells out for you what criteria must be met in order to be exempt from needing a public performance license for the exhibition of a movie or resource within the walls of your school. Those components of this are that one, it needs to be a teacher and students physically present engaged in face to face teaching activities. So you must be physically present to qualify for this exemption. And it must be a teacher and students in that classroom setting of only enrolled students and the movie in this case being a core essential part of the curriculum and learning objectives. For most, this next one doesn&#8217;t really apply but it must be a not for profit educational institution and the movie must be legally obtained. But again, as a high level involved in face to face instruction with a teacher and only enrolled students present being used in the active curriculum support is kind of the high level of this thing. And when you look at copyright and when you look at the evaluation of if I need a license, if any of these criteria are not met, the answer is you need a license. If you meet all of these criteria, you may not need a license accordingly. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re gonna go through within our within what we&#8217;re calling polls or at least what the system calls polls. But with some of this interactivity in here, where we can gauge some areas to determine if you believe they need a license and then we&#8217;ll talk through why they do or why they don&#8217;t. One of the challenges of copyright law that we consistently encounter is that copyright law is intentionally written to contain a number of gray areas. Copyright law is written basically to say that like, here&#8217;s some guidelines and parameters, but ultimately it will be a jury of your peers who decide if what your use case was legal or not legal. And so our goal in all of this is to help protect you from that step, to help mitigate any of that risk, to help give you all of these guidelines and parameters so that you have things you can look out for in your schools to better determine if licensing is required or if you align in this case with face to face teaching exemptions. So let&#8217;s dive in to our polling. Again, you should see when we launch these, they should show up on your screen. If they don&#8217;t, we&#8217;ll let you know when you should see them. But you should otherwise have an ability to click on the polls icon on the right hand side if for some reason you can&#8217;t see them. But let&#8217;s go ahead and get started. Alright. So we&#8217;re gonna put a little bit of the knowledge Brian just gave us to a test and run through some situations. We are going to start off with this one, getting in the Halloween spirit a little bit. When that poll appears, feel free to answer yes, no, or unsure. The situation is to celebrate Halloween, a sixth grade class votes to watch Hocus Pocus during the last part of the school day. Students settle in with snacks while movie plays as a fun seasonal treat. There is no lesson assignment or instructional discussion connected to the film. What do we think? Do we need a license? Do we not need a license? Are we unsure? Okay. We&#8217;ve got votes coming in. Again, if you&#8217;re not seeing the poll, you should see this on you should be able to click on a polls icon. But based on the volume of votes coming in, it looks like everybody is likely seeing this entire thing. Sydney, Seth, I think we&#8217;re getting some pretty significant consensus here. We&#8217;ve got 91% saying that yes, I do need a license for that. 8% saying no, I do not need a license for that. Seth, what do you say about that? We would definitely need a license for this one. So the sixth grade class, it&#8217;s considered this is like an entertainment. This is a reward. Any of those kind of things, require a license. It&#8217;s considered a public performance. And so, yeah, it looks like everybody on here, lot of they are in agreement. It looks like we&#8217;ve got, yeah, right around 92 percent saying yes. But yeah, this would be one of those situations where we definitely would have to have a license in place. Even though it was the sixth grade class, other things to consider on here, because there&#8217;s a lot of different scenarios. If it&#8217;s in the class, but it&#8217;s still a reward day, a holiday party, any of those kind of things, those are considered, even though it&#8217;s in the classroom, still needs a public performance license. Also here, doesn&#8217;t specify, especially if it&#8217;s in an auditorium, the gymnasium, or even outside on a nice fall day, where our annual license covers those showings on school property, and we&#8217;ll get into those benefits here later. But, all of those would require a health performance license. Yeah, Seth, something I see on semi regular basis is perhaps a little bit of confusion on if it&#8217;s in the classroom, it doesn&#8217;t necessarily need a license which is just not necessarily true. Going back to that face to face teaching exemption. In this case, we&#8217;re going to make the assumption in it that there is a teacher present. We&#8217;re going make the assumption that it is enrolled students based on their voting to happen here. But there&#8217;s no lesson, there&#8217;s no assignment, there&#8217;s no instructional activities. It&#8217;s easy to say that this doesn&#8217;t align with core curriculum and accomplishment of learning objectives. And again, if it doesn&#8217;t align with every single one of those scenarios and face to face instruction, in fact you will need a license. So okay, off to a good start. Let&#8217;s move on to the next one. We&#8217;ve got four or five days so bear with us but they maybe as a sneak peek, they get harder as we go. All right. So you guys knocked it out of the park with that first one. Let&#8217;s Let&#8217;s have some more knowledge on the second one. So again, same way with the polls, fill them out as you go on how confident you feel, just fill it in. A fifth grade teacher is using Ratatouille as part of a lesson on character development and theme. Students will watch selected scenes from the film and analyze how Remy&#8217;s choices, challenges, and relationships contribute to his development throughout the story. After viewing, students will identify evidence from the film to support a written response about perseverance and pursuing a goal despite obstacles. What do we think? Licensed? Not licensed? We don&#8217;t know. Oops. Sorry. I put my phone on mute. Votes are flying in on this, and we have a strong consensus, I must say, as it relates to ratatouille in this case. It looks like there&#8217;s still one or two coming in but we are at this moment, Sydney, 100% say no, I do not need a license for this. What do you have to say about that? That is correct. For this specific situation, you do not need a license. A couple of reasons why. Right there in the first, sentence, we see that it is being used as a part of a lesson on character development and theme. Additionally, we also see that there is a specific written response tied back to that character development and theme that we&#8217;re learning about. We are also, it&#8217;s being shown in a classroom with enrolled students. And so, yep, for this one you would not need a license. I&#8217;d to add a few things too. I think one of the key things here is it says, you know, they&#8217;re watching selected scenes from the film. I think that&#8217;s a really big call out. My favorite example in talking to schools across, you know, is, you know, just because the third grade class finished a section on the ocean, you can&#8217;t watch the entire movie Finding Nemo and considering it, oh, well, I don&#8217;t need a license for that. This is clearly aligned with instruction, not, more of what we would call a reward day of like, hey, we finished this section and we&#8217;re gonna watch this for good. So that&#8217;s one of those real good call outs. And as you can see, it starts to get really specific. And I like to always bring up, this is why administrators, principal, things like that really sometimes look at, hey, we just wanna look at the annual license. And we&#8217;ll talk more about the benefits of the license here in a little bit. But because there&#8217;s so many little gray areas and if a teacher decided to show the whole movie, would that maybe need a license now as opposed to just the selected scenes? And so it&#8217;s a way for our schools to really be covered, and and the administrators of those schools to know more like an insurance policy of, hey, we know that we are covered on the movie use side. Yeah, there&#8217;s so many nuances to these things. On queue, Seth, with that, we&#8217;re gonna get into some more nuanced scenarios. So maybe we&#8217;ll try and trip a few of you up here with these. Yeah. That last one, like Brian said, we ended with a 100%. So let&#8217;s see if we can keep that up for this next one. So after finishing their unit on gravity and propulsion, the eleventh grade physics teacher rewards the class with an afternoon showing of Project Hail Mary. The teacher explains to students that the movie connects to several of the concepts they&#8217;ve been studying, but as a result of their positive week, there will be no accompanying assignment or discussion. What do we think? License, no license, we&#8217;re unsure. I gotta say as these are coming in, I actually watched project Hail Mary a couple of weeks ago on a trip and it is a fantastic movie and has so many ties to school and instruction and physics and space exploration. It really was a movie that I was surprised by how well aligned it would be with especially high school science. Okay. We are getting some votes and as perhaps anticipated as we get a little bit more challenging, we&#8217;ve got we&#8217;ve got more discrepancies in here. I was about to read the votes but then a few more came in and adjusted some of the percentages. So at least at this point, we are 70% sorry, 76% now, 76%, 78%. We got late we got some late addition. 78 say, yes, I do need a license, 14% say no, 7% unsure. Seth, what do think? In mind, on this one, I would always say we need a license, and the really big call out here is it&#8217;s a reward to the class for a hard week of studying or a hard week of work or you kind of really said it was a great positive week. We&#8217;re gonna be able to watch this as a reward on the Friday afternoon of class. Those any kind of reward day, those kind of pieces always require a public performance license. Yeah, the no accompanying assignment or discussion, it kind of ties into your Finding Nemo example that you were, explaining before we transitioned over to this one of there&#8217;s connectivity, there&#8217;s alignment, there&#8217;s academic value, no doubt as it creates some level of visualization for concepts that were discussed earlier in the week or in the unit in this example. But there&#8217;s not that complete connectivity that really wraps it around that piece of tied to core curriculum as required within the face to face teaching exemptions. So, good job everyone. So like I said, that&#8217;s a much more challenging one to look at. And again, we&#8217;re gonna try and get there with a couple more of these as well. All right. To Brian&#8217;s point, these are getting a little bit harder as we go. So very impressive that the percentage is still staying so high. We&#8217;ve got about two more to go. So let&#8217;s keep testing that knowledge. The school librarian has started a monthly movie and book club. Students will read the book, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and then watch the film adaptation, I&#8217;m sorry, then have the opportunity to voluntarily stay after school to watch the film adaptation together and discuss how the movie compares to the book. What do we think? Does this need a license? Does this not need a license? Are we unsure? How are we looking on votes, Brian? They are still coming in, but this one has quite a bit of unanimous consensus so far. As they come in, I will hold back what that consensus is just not to sway any future votes. Again, as you&#8217;re out, we&#8217;re getting some dissension. As a reminder, these things are all anonymous. We don&#8217;t have any record of how you vote on it. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s certainly for fun. So go out on a limb. It&#8217;s why we&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll leave off the numbers until we get closer to everybody voting so we can get a broad consensus. But okay, Sydney, at this point, we are 80% yes, I need a license, 20% no, I do not need a license. Any thoughts on that? So for this particular situation, you actually would need a license. A couple of call outs in this situation, Big part is that this is for a movie and book club. This isn&#8217;t for a required school class. While it could be enrolled students within the school, they are not necessarily enrolled within a particular course. That also being said, the opportunity to voluntarily stay after school. That is a big call out with this one. Again, it&#8217;s not part of the required core curriculum. And while there is still that discussion piece after, that piece of it being a club and after school, does require a license. You know, Brian, what would be great is if there was a license that covered any club showing a movie. Oh, wait, there is. I&#8217;ll talk more about that a little bit. But, to that point, actually, the license covers any club, whether there&#8217;s a teacher there, if it&#8217;s a student club on campus, any of those. You know, we can talk about that in just a little about how those clubs are covered if they wanted to use it for recruiting purposes or just a reward or just a hangout time, for those student clubs. Yeah, this example is always interesting. We are examples that we&#8217;ve done like these Because some of them as you they become a bit transferable in other ways, right? This isn&#8217;t an after school club, it&#8217;s voluntary attendance. But we certainly see a lot of scenarios coming through our streaming platform where it is a literature course where a class is doing a book to movie comparison or a comparison contrast essay associated with them. And you could take a very similar concept to this, remove the club, remove the volunteer nature of it and put it into an English lit classroom. And it may in fact qualify with perhaps some additional context, may in fact qualify for face to face teaching exemptions. And it&#8217;s really the SaaS point where the license comes in, it&#8217;s where the gray area comes in that that if all of those face to face teaching parameters are not met then it ultimately requires public performance licensing even if the end goal is something similar through the initiative. And right leading into that, we&#8217;re gonna just kind of review again what is required, to not need a license. So there&#8217;s five core aspects, and we&#8217;ve actually come up with this beautiful abbreviation to help remember them all. So it&#8217;s nice and simple for us in the classroom. It&#8217;s a teach. The first one, the T is for teacher led. As Brian mentioned earlier, this means that there is a teacher physically in the classroom with enrolled students. This does not qualify for online schools. That&#8217;s a conversation that was had a lot during COVID and a question that comes up often. The teacher does have to be present or a teacher has to be present in the classroom with enrolled students. That&#8217;s the T and the E. Then A, appropriate classroom setting. As we discussed a little bit, in those situations, that is one that&#8217;s definitely up for interpretation. If you&#8217;re having a theater class, then very much an auditorium or a theater esque setting is an appropriate classroom setting. Whereas, Brian and I were having a discussion earlier, you know, a gym is equally inappropriate classroom setting for a physical education class. But when you&#8217;re talking about having a basketball game or a pep rally in there, not so much you know that classroom setting, your traditional classroom setting chairs in front of the whiteboard. That&#8217;s good to go. That is for sure a classroom setting. So that one is a little bit up for interpretation. And again, where that licensing piece really comes in handy because that you don&#8217;t have to worry about marking off that box and making sure is a pep rally, is this a classroom or not. The fourth letter for C is gonna be curriculum. That&#8217;s again tying it directly back to whatever unit or teaching standard that you&#8217;re discussing, having those discussions after the movie showings or having an assignment and essay, it has to tie back to that curriculum somehow. And then that final letter that H is a legally obtained copy. And we&#8217;ll discuss that a little bit more moving on typically. The easiest way to legally obtain a copy is to buy a DVD version of it. I know DVD versions so old school but that&#8217;s the easiest way to make sure that it&#8217;s a legally obtained copy. So again, quick way to make sure that you&#8217;re checking all five of those boxes. Are you teaching? Are you teaching? T E A C H. Are you teaching? Love that. Well, Seth, you said you alluded to the licensing a few times in there. Do you wanna talk to the license and what it is, what it covers, all of those sorts of things? Yep. I will talk through that. So our annual license. So Swank offers an annual site license. This covers the entire school, so not just the classroom or not just the gymnasium, it would be the entire school site. And it is the only license out there that can cover all the major studios under one annual license, which means our schools, they don&#8217;t have to go in and go, wait, what studio is this? Do we need to make sure that we have a license specific to this studio or just for this movie? They know that if they have an annual license, any of those movies covered by the majors or any of the major studios, are included in that license and they are then included as all the movies are included in there. So what exactly does it cover? We&#8217;ll talk through that. Actually, there was a question in here that came in that maybe somebody&#8217;s familiar with. They said, hey, we have a license through the PTA. Does this cover the after school program and the summer program if they pay throughout the year? And yes, the annual license is a site license. Some schools are very, very fortunate and their PTA or their parent group partners go, hey, we&#8217;re gonna, we have a couple of events planned, so we&#8217;re gonna pay for the annual license for the school. But then that same license covers the entire school. So your teachers can use movies for reward days. As you can see on the screen here, there&#8217;s some other things like rainy day recess and aftercare program. Obviously those family movie nights, those are kind of the easiest of, oh, we&#8217;re having a family movie night, we got to have a license. Reward days, we talked through some of the scenarios thereof like, hey, we&#8217;ve had a great week, we&#8217;re going to do this at the end of the school year, Kids are kind of a little off focus, so we just wanna be able to watch something that&#8217;s educational, but also maybe keeps their focus and we can do something as a reward. Holiday parties are kind of more one of those obvious ones again. And then special events. Sometimes we have different opportunities to have different things. I&#8217;ve talked to club events. I saw that a couple of schools that I worked with this past year, the senior class did a movie night just as a fundraiser. And this is some we&#8217;ll talk a little bit more about this, but this what all does the school or what all does the, annual site license covers? It&#8217;s 20 fourseven movie showings. You don&#8217;t have to report the title to us because the license covers all of those major studios. It&#8217;s the only license out there that includes coverage for all the studios out there, all the major studios. So you can&#8217;t go find somebody out there that says, we&#8217;ve got a license and it covers Disney, you can play whatever you want, because we&#8217;re the only ones out there that provide a license that covers that. And then it covers a lot of those different kind of scenarios, whether it&#8217;s in the library, in the classroom, on school grounds, outside or indoor, that&#8217;s another call out for this, the license. Really actually a great improvement to the license in the last couple of years where our studio partners said, you know, yeah, let&#8217;s include outdoor showings as long as it&#8217;s on school property. And so can&#8217;t have the annual site license doesn&#8217;t cover, hey, I&#8217;m gonna go down to the park down the street and we&#8217;re gonna watch a movie down there. But if it&#8217;s on the parking lot and we&#8217;re gonna do a movie night under the stars or something like that, and we have family movie night coming in, that is covered as long as it&#8217;s for the school community. And when I say school community, always refer to that&#8217;s your students, your faculty, and your family of your students. The school can&#8217;t go, hey, we have a license. Tell the city hall that they can host their movie down on our parking lot. Just for the whole city. It has to be school folks. It is for the school which is pretty apparent. It&#8217;s obviously a school site license but I always like to call that out. But indoor and outdoor showings are all covered. And again, those rainy day recesses, inclement weather. I&#8217;ve had schools say, you know what? We live in a spot where sometimes our buses get delayed by an hour because of snow. We throw a movie on in the gymnasium so that students, while they&#8217;re sitting waiting for roads to get cleared, have a a movie to watch. That needs a public performance license. That&#8217;s covered. Aftercare programs, your students that are maybe hanging out after school or a planned aftercare program, if they&#8217;re throwing a movie in for entertainment or having a movie even playing in the background, that all requires a public performance license. Then obviously, some of the other scenarios that we talked about where there&#8217;s that gray area of does it need a license? I work with a lot of principals and administrators and where they come from, they say, you know what? I don&#8217;t know a 100% how my teachers are gonna use movies. They know the rules, but what if somebody plays the whole movie when they should have only maybe played a selected scene, having the annual license, they know that that&#8217;s covered and they&#8217;re happy with that. And so that&#8217;s another opportunity for, really the, the coverage of the license itself. And then one thing, and I, Brian, if you wanna go to the next slide now. Sorry, I was, I was talking too much and I didn&#8217;t go straight to Not at all. I actually feel bad that I jumped the gun on you there. But there&#8217;s a lot of other resources. We have a customer hub and any school that has the license has access to these resources. We want event planning resources, seasonal programming, promotional materials. That would be the first one I&#8217;ll talk about. We have a promo builder on our customer hub where if you wanna make movie tickets to pass out to kids, or if you wanna make a poster for the hall or the school or the classroom, you can make that. We try to present seasonally, we do like a holiday programming toolkit for the winter holidays or for Halloween. We work with different schools and different things. One of my favorite we&#8217;ve done in the past was how to host a sensory friendly movie, event. You know, we worked with some schools, and we worked with actually some public libraries to kinda really come up with a a guide on how do we put together how could a school put together a sensory friendly movie night, so that it&#8217;s really all inclusive? And, you we had some great results and some fun things that that schools were able to contribute on, hey, this is what we do, those kind of pieces. Obviously, have helpful guides, copyright licensing guides. And another big thing, that a lot of schools aren&#8217;t familiar with is fundraising. The annual site license covers unlimited fundraising. So I mentioned earlier, the senior class did a fundraising night for their senior project or their senior gift. I&#8217;ve seen junior classes do fundraising nights to pay for help, pay for prom, and some of the the school events that&#8217;s going there at school. They have obviously PTA parent groups, PTOs, any of those. A lot of times they&#8217;ll have a fundraiser, that obviously contributes. As long as the money is being raised back for a school club function and the school itself, that money, that fundraising, is available. Now a school can&#8217;t host a fundraiser for a nationwide fundraiser that they&#8217;re gonna send the money out to. That is not what this fundraiser is, but as long as that money is being raised for the school, unlimited fundraising. I&#8217;ve seen schools do something as simple as, hey, bring a classroom supply to school and that&#8217;s your movie ticket, you know, crayon, the box of Kleenexes, and all of sudden a family of five can attend a movie night and have fun together for the cost of a classroom supply and a nice fundraiser for that classroom as opposed to maybe the 40 or $50 that they can&#8217;t afford. You know, looking at something outside of that. That&#8217;s a great way to participate and then moving even further where schools go, hey, we&#8217;re got we&#8217;ve got concessions, we&#8217;ve got food trucks, all of this money, we&#8217;re getting a portion of that it&#8217;s going back to the school and they can really build it into a quite the big fundraiser there. We have a guide on our, customer hub all about fundraising and so that&#8217;s a great resource also. Copyright education, Brian mentioned this too. We have lots of guides as resources that you can kind of find out how to host a movie night, how to make sure that you&#8217;re copyright compliant. But also, as Brian mentioned, we love to do professional development. Our renewal team is available to jump on a call and talk through those questions, but also even come in person or maybe do a virtual training for your teachers or your librarians or something like that so that we can really help make sure that the school understands copyright similar to what we&#8217;re talking through here and then also have that chance for question and answers. And so, I know that, as we move forward, I wanted to kinda, there are a couple other things. Is there another slide on this, Brian, right after this that&#8217;s talking about kind of just all the planning that&#8217;s available. We have a lot of new releases coming soon. I&#8217;ll let Sydney talk a little bit more about this, but as you can see, you know, with a a lineup of movies coming in the fall, obviously, great movies that get released throughout the year. All of these great titles and many, many, many more. All covered under the, the annual public performance license. And I just wanted to kind of mention that, and Sydney, you can kind of jump in here and talk a little bit more about that. But these are, all just an example of titles that are all covered under the license. Yeah. So Seth kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, we are the only provider, for all of the motion major motion picture studios. So that being said, we do, provide coverage for a lot of big name new release movies that you&#8217;ve heard of. Biggest one you&#8217;re probably seeing on your screen right now that you&#8217;re like, Oh yeah, that&#8217;s a big one, Toy Story five. That&#8217;s one of the most requested movies. I probably get that movie requested at least three times It&#8217;s a highly anticipated, highly loved film. And so that&#8217;s definitely one of the ones that like we are very excited to have and to be able to offer underneath this coverage in this license. But also, we talked about Project Hail Mary earlier and how that can be used so beneficially within a school. And that&#8217;s one of the new releases that we have. And the minion movies and Spider Man and there&#8217;s so many great movies that are listed here but also coming soon. And they can be used for reward days like we&#8217;ve said if you have that license. But they also do have that great beneficial education side. And you don&#8217;t wanna tie them back necessarily to a specific assignment or unit but you wanna give your students a break, a brain break and show part of the movie that there&#8217;s some really great options that we are excited to be able to provide and to show and be the only ones that can say that. And then along with that then that&#8217;s a good segue. Sorry Brian. A good segue into kind of what does, what other things do we offer? Know we&#8217;ve mentioned licensing, we&#8217;ve mentioned public performance, we&#8217;ve mentioned some streaming and I wanted to kind of talk through Well actually before we go to that Brian, did you have anything that you wanted to add to those new releases? Well I just gonna mention that with the new release stuff that we always highlight and we celebrate kind of the Toy Stories and the Monsters and Minions and all these things coming out. Moana Live is coming out here really quickly. But to Seth&#8217;s point, we work with every major movies Disney and Sony and Paramount and Universal and Warner Brothers and Lions Gate and MGM and all of these covered by this annual license. And so it&#8217;s not only the new releases that get included in that, it is tens of thousands of movies that are covered by the annual license. Coming up here into the holidays, well, I guess back to school you end up oftentimes for like a family movie night or a fundraising event will oftentimes see the new releases used as a programming idea. But once you get into October, we start seeing a lot of those Halloween movies coming out Casper and Hocus Pocus and Coco and they&#8217;re they&#8217;re used not only in events and trunk or treats and they&#8217;re used in Halloween parties. I&#8217;ve got young kids in elementary school and every year they seem to hand out candy and have a movie playing in the background. The annual license is covering all of those things. It&#8217;s a good way to engage kids in extended care programs. But it&#8217;s also does get a lot of those get used as a part of instructional activities as well to engage their students. The nature of the movie itself is not indicated in the face to face teaching exemptions. And so where I think Seth was going is not only do we provide the annual licensing but we also do provide an educational streaming platform where we&#8217;re able to facilitate access to content in a way that allows for instruction as well. And so to kind of break these two things down, Swank has this annual license which we&#8217;ve touched on a number of times. Legal coverage 20 fourseven inside and outside the school building, all of these major movie studios covering all of those gray area things like an insurance policy. But then it comes down to access, right? And so we will let me give me one second and I can pull up the streaming platform here. And we I realized we have fifteen minutes left, we want to leave room for Q and A. I know there&#8217;s a couple of questions pending here. We will get those I promise you. But also just want to give everyone a quick look at this and we can always walk through this in more detail if at any point somebody wants to see the streaming platform. But with Swank, we have either the base license, the annual license that we&#8217;ve talked about or licensing and streaming that can be added accordingly. So if you have the annual license, you can add streaming on top of that. Streaming is not a requirement. You do not have to have Swank streaming platform in order to have the annual license and cover you from all of these copyright items. And again to the conversation, streaming is is while it supports the license, it can be used for all of those fun events. It&#8217;s also really built significantly around supporting instruction and some of those exemptions to copyright law with the face to face teaching accordingly. So in this, we have over 50,000 movies, documentaries, educational series that make up this library. When I say educational series, mean things like Bill Knight, A Science Guy. We partnered with Discovery Channel in the spring, Smithsonian Channel last fall. You get into things outside of movies like HBO documentaries, Magnolia has a ton of documentaries. There&#8217;s a lot of series that kind of get wrapped up into this overall list that tie into really every subject area taught across schools. And maybe instead of just scrolling through that, we&#8217;ll give a couple of examples. If I&#8217;m a teacher and I&#8217;m wanting to show the movie Wonder as a part of my instruction, I have the ability obviously to click watch, play this movie inside my classroom accordingly, right? Teachers have been doing this for decades now, movies built into their lessons accordingly. But where we differentiate from what would be traditional access points. In my day, it would have been VHS tape. Then fast forward to DVDs and DVD players. And now obviously the world has transitioned into an expectation of streaming. And realizing that some districts block access to personal streaming, many have policies against them, which ties back into some of these questions around the use around the license. They also are not necessarily built for instruction. The platforms are built for a commercial application in kind of a home viewing environment and they don&#8217;t necessarily include all of the tools that teachers need in order to teach with the use of video. And so that&#8217;s where the streaming platform really becomes advantageous. So to extend outside of just the ability to watch a film in class, a teacher also has the ability to assign this movie out to students. Keep in mind what you&#8217;re looking at on the screen here, an admin or an instructor sees this library, students do not. Teachers control what students have visibility into. And realizing that class time is tight, realizing that curriculum is tight, realizing that there&#8217;s not a ton of time to show movies in class but there&#8217;s still that value of the visual element of it. We give teachers the ability to extend the classroom by with the ability to provide access through Google Classroom or Schoology, Blackboard, Canvas. It can be placed in an online course syllabus outside the classroom but still retaining control from a teacher perspective. Additionally, knowing that teachers are oftentimes as a part of instruction not showing a full length film, they&#8217;re showing portions of a film. Teachers have this ability to create what we call our bookmarks. And if I&#8217;m a teacher creating a bookmark, I&#8217;m able to identify the very specific scene that I want to either leverage as a part of my classroom instruction. So in this case, picked an eight nine minute scene accordingly. And I&#8217;m just gonna put a quick test in here so you guys don&#8217;t necessarily need to see me, watch me type this out. But I am able to as a teacher now play this segment in my class but I&#8217;m also able to assign this segment out to my students. So it&#8217;s a way that I can isolate a very specific scene or a very specific that I provide out to my students. Again, teachers retaining all the control. And so you&#8217;re able to leverage video in different ways than those traditional platforms that I mentioned of either again, physical media, personal streaming accounts that they&#8217;re not blocked in your district, those kinds of things. In a way that just extends the classroom. And there&#8217;s all kinds of teaching strategies that ultimately we see start to come out of having access to this. As an example, in year one when I look at the data of our streaming platform, most of the use is taking place inside the classroom. It ties into some surveys that we&#8217;ve done historically which basically say that teachers aren&#8217;t assigning film out to students. And the follow-up question of that is why and it always comes down to equitable access. Teachers want the ability to share access out, but they need to do so in an equitable way. And there&#8217;s just not a traditional media a way to do so. This facilitates equitable access. So what we start to see over the course of time is years two, three, four and five of schools having streaming through Swank. We start to see assignment take off as far as access. In the beginning, it looks a lot like absenteeism. But as we move forward, teachers are facilitating access for things like flipped learning opportunities. They&#8217;re facilitating access for extra credit. They&#8217;re facilitating access for things like, I&#8217;ve got an example built in here of under my bookmarks. You see I&#8217;ve got three different bookmarks created under Hamlet. Two of these are segments of the film, one is the entire film. So in this case, a teacher is able to show a couple of segments in class but then students who after reading Hamlet need a visual element to connect the dots, teacher can provide them with access to the entire full length film. So it&#8217;s something that gives us a little bit more flexibility than is otherwise there in what would be traditional access points. Additionally, and I&#8217;m not sure we have the time to go into it, but we also offer an AI powered teaching assistant as we call it. This is an ability where teachers are able to leverage a controlled AI environment that&#8217;s built around our streaming library. Where not only can you search for film by standards or your curriculum or learning concepts, but you&#8217;re also able to apply, look for lesson activities to be built out on from your film or video that you&#8217;re looking to do. It&#8217;s a really interesting creative way to leverage AI to make scalability out of aligning all of this with standards with curriculum with those kinds of resources. We also recently and I apologize the scroll here, have added a whole lot of new features into the streaming library. If you&#8217;ve seen this in the past, we&#8217;ve added what we call our key scene guides. These key scene guides are very specifically the ability. So if I&#8217;m looking to show for example October Sky, we have an entire scene guide that breaks down the key scenes and timestamps that we see leveraged within October Sky creating efficiencies for teachers in either lesson planning or the creation of bookmarks accordingly. Something that aligns with their instruction. We also have lesson guides different than key scene guides. These lesson guides are built actually from a variety of foundations. We&#8217;ve had some of our social emotional learning guides that are created by the founding director of the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence. Doctor. Mark Brackett created lesson guides around social emotional learning for us. We have some that are studio created that create educational guides associated with their films. We have one coming out recently for Young Washington that&#8217;s coming up here pretty soon. That&#8217;s a phenomenal guide tied to all different kinds of grade levels for Young Washington which is a new release. And then we have others that are created by educators. And I can jump into this Selena High School Spanish one. But you see this one breaks down specific vocabulary. It breaks down scene prompts. It breaks down activities that can be tied to it. There&#8217;s exit tickets associated with it. So it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s new. Realize we&#8217;re getting short on time, we won&#8217;t spend too much time in there. But it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s new that we continue to expand upon. We continue to engage teachers. We continue to engage knowledge experts or studio partners to build out the resources that we&#8217;re able to provide to teachers from within the streaming platform to ensure alignment with instruction. One last piece that I will show you in this as well that administrators are typically very interested in, is there are a lot of administrative controls in this as well. That schools and districts are looking to centralize access to video which has traditionally been a bit of what has just been referred to as like the wild west of video. Going too many disparate resources for access. And in this case, we consolidate that. But we&#8217;re also able to layer on a lot of features to help control those things. And so when we work with a school or a district, what we typically do is we provide a curated collection either elementary, middle school, high school or district collection that is highlights the top used films in those areas. But again, 50,000 videos in this. We don&#8217;t wanna be the barrier to academic freedom. So if as a teacher, I need to use a film that&#8217;s not just readily available in here, I&#8217;m able to request that I want this added to my school or my district library. And then as an administrator, if you so choose, you&#8217;re able to mediate those requests. You get the feedback from teachers on what the request is, why they&#8217;re looking to use this film, how they&#8217;re looking to use it, and you can either approve or deny that request accordingly. If you approve it, it automatically becomes available for the teacher. If you deny it, you&#8217;re able to provide a note. I need, you know, parental permission slips or we have this policy or be aware of this sort of thing. It gives an additional layer, again an optional one for schools and districts to have a level of control over this to ensure that the curation of your library for your school or district aligns with your use policies and your expectations accordingly. Seth, I don&#8217;t know if you have anything to add. I know I ran through that really quickly as trying to get through a high level but any thoughts, anything that I missed in at least walking through this streaming platform. I think that was a great recap and overview, you know, and a very, very quick one. So if you do want more detail, obviously you can reach out and we&#8217;d love to walk through, you know, how it can really apply to your school or your district. And as Brian kind of even covered there, a lot of the scenarios that we just talked through on the copyright side, this is also a tool that allow helps facilitate those educational and instructional moments in the classroom even more. That&#8217;s a good point. One thing I missed or I failed to mention and this is probably not the film to do it with but it&#8217;s in front of me so we&#8217;ll do it. Again, the streaming platform aside from the instructional pieces that I mentioned is also meant to be paired with the license, right? So there&#8217;s this drop down here where will those title be viewed and this goes into this request process. It includes options of in class or homework assignment. It includes options of, excuse me, at school but not in the classroom and outdoor. It&#8217;s a way that that allows for the communication of the intention behind the film. So that the person who&#8217;s reviewing those requests understands where this request is coming from and it can be leveraged accordingly. So again, as a reminder, we&#8217;ll hop into our q and a session right now because we&#8217;ve got only four minutes left and we wanna be respectful of everybody&#8217;s time. One question that came through is that I have a Swank license, is the streaming included with my license? So just to clarify on that. The licensing and streaming are two separate items. If you have the license specifically through Swank, streaming would be an add on to that license. You&#8217;re not required to have the streaming add on. You&#8217;re still allowed to use any legal source to facilitate your access if you have the license by itself. But if you want to add the license to your streaming, we are able to do so accordingly. And if you have neither the licensing or the streaming currently, you&#8217;re able to either add licensing by itself or licensing and streaming combined, whatever is best and most appropriate for your school or for your district. thank you all. Thank you for joining us. Hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully it answered any questions that you may have. If others pop up, we&#8217;re certainly here as a resource however you may need us. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"card-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/article>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From reward days and family movie nights to classroom instruction and after-school programs, movies play an important role in K\u201312 education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":4134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"content-type":[129],"topic":[130],"class_list":["post-4111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","content-type-webinar","topic-copyright-compliance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Before You Press Play... - Swank Motion Pictures K-12<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"From reward days and family movie nights to classroom instruction and after-school programs, movies play an important role in K\u201312 education.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swank.com\/k12\/blog\/before-you-press-play\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Before You Press Play... - 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