Blog 3!

Hello!

Copyright is used to protect someone's original creations or ideas from being used or distributed by others. Some examples of items that tend to be copyrighted are books, music, and motion pictures. Fair use allows people to create copies of copyrighted material only for educational and nonprofit purposes. However, there are some limitations because it depends on different factors: the amount of the copyrighted material being used, how it is being used in general, and the effect of the material being used. There are so many instructional tools and classroom materials in general that can be found online. In order for me to use these, I would need to make sure that I am allowed to use them in my classroom. Most of the time you can tell what you can and cannot use because it will state for public use or not and maybe even make you pay for the item. For my own creations, I will look into getting them copyrighted. For my students' own creations I will remind them of the rules about using copyrighted material and what to do if they would like to copyright their own material whether that is now or in the future.

One technology implementation issue is cyberbullying. Chromebooks that are used in schools for educational purposes have a word filter system on them. This word filter system highlights words that are inappropriate or considered rude. Then someone filters through all of the documents they receive to see if it was an actual violation or not because sometimes it can be for an assignment. As a teacher, I can remind my students of what cyberbullying is and its effects. I can also remind them that what they say/do can follow them for a very long time or maybe their whole lifetime. Lastly, I can then remind them of the word filter system that is in place on the technology. Another technology implementation issue is academic dishonesty. There are many websites that detect plagiarism in assignments so I would use those in my classroom. I would let my students know that I will be sending their assignments through plagiarism detectors if I sense that someone might've not submitted their own, original work. I would encourage my students to come to me with any and all questions because that is what I am there for. I would answer these questions happily knowing they are cheating or plagiarizing. 

A skill that I acquired from working on the newsletter was picture placement and how exactly to use columns effectively. Sometimes when I put my pictures onto my document they wouldn't move how I wanted them to. So, I learned how to wrap them and place them exactly where I would like. Then, I learned about the columns. I already knew how to put my document into columns but I didn't really know how to work or format them until working on this newsletter. I can improve my newsletter in the future by using a better color scheme. For some reason the way that my document looked on word and saved as a pdf had totally different colors so it was hard to work with. I finally got them to both be the same color but it took a long time and by then I had lost my patience with it. In my future career, geology, pamphlets and posters are often made to share your research so this helped me become more familiar with Microsoft Word.