Blog Post 3

It is interesting learning about copyright and fair use as I never was taught the legal aspect of copyright before in detail and what does and does not constitute as fair use. When developing my own instructional material, I will have to take into consideration this fact, because while legal action is practically unheard of, I don’t want to end up on the news on how I am getting sued by Disney for showing a movie. In terms of how I will address copyright and fair use with my students and their own work, since the youngest of kids I plan on working with is going to be in sixth grade, I will first go over the basics of what is and isn’t allowed before my students create their own works. It was interesting to learn that copyright starts as soon as a work is created. I am curious and wonder how far the limits of “fair use” are, especially as I see a surge of online videos doing the same video (sometimes nearly identical in structure, not just in concept) ideas over and over again and how there isn’t a deviation from most of these videos.

 

Decreased productivity is a huge issue when technology is brought into the classroom. A proposed solution is to limit the most of the distractions that students may utilize. For instance, these days when students have access to computers in the classroom, many schools have blocks on games and sometimes even have programs where teachers can monitor students from their own computer. That would be the best solution as long as it is paired with limiting technology when not necessarily necessary (for instance if it is a basic writing assignment, have the students use paper and pencil instead of computers) and save the technology for the things where technology is required for the activity (for instance a webquest).

 

 

When working on my Newsletter Design assignment I learned a lot about the formatting on Word. For instance, I knew how to make columns, but I didn’t know that I could create columns for only certain sections which I thought was cool. In the future when I get more proficient with Word, I hope to improve my newsletter by adding more design aspects that I was unsure how to do/that was even possible. These skills can help me with my future career of becoming a secondary teacher as even though I most likely will not be sending newsletters home, I can customize assignments and have more control over the document itself.

"Roman Coliseum" by lisafree54 is marked with CC0 1.0.