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Blog Journal 3

 Hello everyone!

Today I will be talking about copyright and fair use, technology implementation issues, and some new skills I learned working on my newsletter assignment.

As a student I have to be very aware of copyright laws and fair use laws so I don’t steal anyone’s work. It is my understanding that copyright is a way that people legally protect their own intellectual property. This can be done by purchasing the rights to a body of work and if someone else wants to use it they must either credit the owner and/or pay a fee. Fair use is almost an exception to copyright laws and allows users to copy materials as long as the individual is not financially being compensated and they are not copying an entire body of work. Within a classroom copyright laws can have an impact on what resources teachers can and cannot legally show their students without getting in legal trouble. This includes things like photocopying or pirating textbooks when developing instruction materials. 

When ever something new is implemented there will always be issues that follow. By implementing technology into the classroom lots of issues can pop up. Two specific issues I want to focus on are academic dishonesty and decreased productivity. Academic dishonesty ties in a little bit with the above paragraph in regards to copyright issues. If students are not using their own work and stealing other peoples intellectual property that is a big issue and can easily be done with access to the internet. A solution I have for academic dishonesty is to require all work to be submitted through TurnIt In or other similar plagiarism checking websites. As for decreased productivity, this can occur as a result of over stimulation, or over access to resources. If a student has a computer in front of them and is being told to write a paper what is stopping them from getting distracted and playing games instead. This type of decreased productivity can possibly be curbed by requiring the students to be on the school WiFi/hotspot so that their activity can be monitored and certain websites can be blocked. 

For class, I had an assignment to make a newsletter for an imaginary class. I actually really enjoyed doing this assignment and I learned a lot. One skill I acquired was the ability to make text into columns. I did not know that Word had that function. I had some trouble getting it to work in a text box though. One way I can improve my newsletter in the future would be to use more varied colors in the letter to make it more visually appealing. My future career is as an Air Field Operator in the Air Force and I will be able to use these skills if I ever need to send out information to the Airmen beneath me. I will also probably need to gear it towards a different audience than my imaginary 2nd grade class. I have attached the newsletter bellow. 

Blog post 2

 As a digital native, I have been typing up assignments on Microsoft Word or Google docs for as long as I can remember. I personally prefer Google docs because I have been using it since I was in high school. It was easier for me to keep all my school documents in my Google drive. This was before Microsoft had made a place to keep files all stored together. 

I thought it was interesting that there was an international standard for educators on technology. The standard that is most meaningful to me is the collaborator. The collaborator is one who uses their peers around them and communicates with others to constantly improve. I think that constant improvement is what makes technology so useful and to use it best is to collaborate with others. 

I agree with the label digital native. Gen Z has never know what it was like to not have technology or be plugged into the digital world. The time when I noticed the biggest difference between me and a digital immigrant was when I was in elementary school. They would always be so slow when they were using technology which is almost  opposite the point. They were so far behind that they preferred to not even use new technology because it was too hard to catch up. I anticipate that it will be similar when I am teaching the next generation. I might prefer to use the technology that I am familiar with over the new fancy tech. 

Journal #1

 Hello Everyone,

My name is Lindsey Griffin, I am currently a Senior majoring in Sociology here at Florida State University. I am heavily involved in the Air Force ROTC program here and will be commissioning as a 2nd Lt when I graduate in the Spring. I love FSU, it is a family school for me, my dad, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins go here so it truly feels like home. I will be very sad to leave in the spring and I cannot imagine being anywhere else. 

Prior to this class, I have not used a lot of technology in an educational setting. When everything went online in the Spring last semester we stitched to using Microsoft Teams which was a very helpful tool in organizing meetings and keeping documents all in one place. I personally like it better than zoom. I use my Google drive a lot as well as my Outlook account to keep everything organized for school, so I imagine that google classroom would be very helpful to educators. 

When talking about my personal learning network I will mainly be referring to ROTC since that is my job and will be my job when I graduate. I do a lot of teaching to the freshman and sophomores in the program.  My personal learning network consists of my roommates, my Cadre in ROTC, and my peers across the nation. We stay in contact using GroupMe and Outlook. The learning resources I use are official Air Force Instructions that give me all the answers I need when I have questions. I can also ask my peers what their interpretations are. I use my peers as a resource most of the time and it is very helpful to be able to talk to students at different universities about what they are doing.