Blog Post 10: Surveys, Classmates, and Continuing in Tech

    Whenever someone creates an intellectual or creative piece of work they are entitled to protect it under Copy Right law. In short, it allows the creator to have control over what happens to the work and be properly compensated or credited. This also means that it protects the work from being stolen, reproduced without compensation, and used in any way without the creator's consent. The internet is full of pictures, articles, songs, and other forms of intellectual property that seem like they can just be used by anyone. However, the majority of it is considered copyrighted material, so it is important to understand how to properly credit creators and when it is okay to use what's found online. There are some laws that explain when it is okay to use other's copyrighted material and detail how to use it, and they are known as Fair Use. The idea behind Fair Use is that if someone were to use another person's copyrighted piece of work it can only be for educational purposes, commentary or criticism, parody, or news reporting. Big things to emphasize here are that the ways in which the copyrighted work is being used and how much of it is being utilized really matter. A lot of learning materials used in the classroom are protected under copyright law, as well as the resources that aid in teaching students. Because of this, it is important for teachers to be careful about what they use in class and distribute to their students. If I were a teacher I would do what some of my teachers did concerning handling copyrighted material responsibly. If I use a photo or infographic that is not mine in a PowerPoint presentation I'll put a caption under it with a proper citation in order to give credit to the owner and explain to the students that it is not mine. Another difficulty can come with class materials. Despite textbooks being pretty expensive, it is illegal and unethical to upload a scanned PDF of it online for students or to print out a large chunk of it to distribute. However, Fair Use does state that small bits of Intellectual Property can be used for educational purposes, so I would probably print out and give my students pages of a specific lesson in the textbook with the most valuable information.  

    As we have made our way into the modern era of technology, all of the benefits of implementing it in classrooms seem to be more evident than ever. While this is true, there is no denying that this implementation might arise some issues such as lack of funding and student privacy. A large number of public schools across the country already lack funding, so implementing technology might not seem like an option. Even if they were to afford to get the technology, they might not be able to train its faculty to use it or to ensure all of the students have equal access to it. Ideally, increased finding to the DOE and ensuring it is used correctly and fairly would be a solution. However, another good solution might also be to provide free training courses for using technology for students and teachers. Also, while there are schools that lack funding, there are schools that have a lot of access to new technology and have the funds to update it. In this case, schools that are able to update their technology regularly can donate the functioning technology they no longer use to other schools that might need it. Another problem concerning the implementation of technology is student privacy. There are places on the internet made for learning and technology made to facilitate it, however, them being educational does not make them invulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Taking a few days to teach students about cybersecurity may be a good solution to this issue. Maybe something like explaining what emails or pop-ups can be scams and what kind of information should not be shared online or through student emails. Nowadays, a lot of operating systems are implemented with anti-virus protection, so ensuring it is on would also be a good idea. 

    This week we had a Digital Newsletter Project due in class and it was pretty fun to make. I learned a lot too, especially about using MS Word. Making columns was not exactly hard, but keeping the spacing and ensuring that the non-textual and word art elements fit into the page without disrupting the writing was pretty difficult. Also, I had no idea there were so many rules to things, so it was good to learn them. For instance, how the first letter of a word in a numbered list should be lower case unless it is a proper noun. And that there are specifics instructions that should go into making a permission slip for a school field trip. Speaking of permission slips, that is something I would improve if I did this project again. I didn't realize there were instructions on how to do it, so I would like to refer to those again and make a proper permission slip. Another thing I would add to the newsletter is more graphics or minimalistic decorations around the articles that fit the theme of the class so it's not just text and abrupt graphics. I had planned to put small lines that resembled the 'crop' logo in Photoshop to keep the theme of the interface throughout, so I would do that in the future. Overall though, I am pretty pleased with the way my newsletter turned out, it was really fun to create, especially the banner :)! Here it is: