Blog Post 3

                                                                Copyright and Fair Use

In terms of copyright and fair use, these concepts are vital to understanding how we as educators can appropriately use technology and resources within our classroom. Copyright would be best described as the rights one possesses to material. In terms of education, we can see this most frequently in one's rights to art, music, and writing. A copyright can limit the amount of people who can use and print these resources. Fair use can best be described as the exceptions to Copyright, or the circumstances which one is able to use copywritten material. This can be in the classroom, in research, and for criticism, along with other instances. As a teacher I would develop my own instructional materials in order to best fit my students, if other teachers wanted to use my material, I would most likely let them without feeling the need to go through a copyright process. However, if I developed my own textbook or instructional materials specifically for teachers, I would go through a copyright process to prevent a publisher from profiting off of my work.

Technology implementation issues have been a consistent aspect of twenty-first century teaching, and in order to properly educate the children of today it is necessary to take time in order to talk to students about said issues. One issue I would feel inclined to talk to them about would have to be academic dishonesty. As an educator, I would want to set standards for my students and their work, emphasizing the need to stay true to their own, original ideas, and when they are referencing someone else's work, they would be expected to provide credit to the original source. A solution to academic dishonesty I would provide to the students would be to first create a clear standard for them to meet. In addition, I would provide them with a rubric which explains how they should properly cite materials, and what is considered to be academically honest. Another issue I would feel the need to address as an educator would include cyberbullying. I want to create a safe place for students to learn, and if we have technology involved in the classroom it is important to create that within the internet sphere as well. In order to address the concept of cyberbullying, I would have a class discussion about the topic, allowing students to express their own experiences and show the impact that cyberbullying could have on a student. In addition, it is important for the students to be moderated within an online classroom setting, so the educator could put an end to the harassment.

Included in my new skills gained from working on the Newsletter design project, I would say that my efficiency with formatting word documents would be the most improved thing. In order to create the aesthetic I was going for, I had to redo a lot of the portions of my newsletter. From this experience, I was able to realize what I did wrong, and stop myself from making those mistakes in the future. In my future career as an educator, this would be very useful as I can create things for my students in terms of newsletters, as well as learning materials. In terms of this, I would say that developing a system for creating new learning materials would be the most useful.