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.
I love your Newsletter! It is very professional. I also did a paragraph on Academic Dishonesty. Your approach in a solution is similar to mine. I also love the format of your blog.
ReplyDeleteHi, Lindsey!
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, your newsletter is so cute! I love how you laid it out and the different colors/fonts:) Second of all, I agree with you that academic dishonesty and decreased productivity are two issues that come from the implementation of technology in the classroom. I liked your solutions to both of these issues with having students turn things in through Turnitin and only allowing students to use school wifi. I feel as though those are both very effective solutions that would lower the risk of these issues occurring in the classroom. Great post!