Blog #3

 

        Copyright is the legal rights given to an individual or group to publish a form of material. Then there is fair use, which is the legal use of copyrighted items without having to ask for permission from the creators. As a teacher these are two terms that come into play when assigning students to an assignment. In my own experience, when giving a writing assignment or presentations, I describe plagiarism and copyrights to my students. I let them know that I want to see their own work and ideas. They will lose points if it is not to my expectations. I show them examples of what copyright looks like based off websites, pictures and so on. I have even done a Kahoot, as a quiz, to make sure my students understand what to look for as far as copyrighting and what they are allowed to take from other peoples ideas and work. They know that the basis of the projects need to be their ideas and if they were to use anything from anyone else they would have to get permission unless it is fair use. For example, my students were assigned a "Cereal Box Project" which is based off of their favorite book. They were asked to design their own box to "sell" to our class but it had to be completely original, without taking other peoples or in this case cereal companies or authors work. 

    In my class to avoid technology implementation issues I would set standards, give examples of what not to do, and consequences for those who do not follow rules. In the case of Academic Dishonesty, I would set standards by following school policy, as well as give examples before due dates of assignments to show the students what is expected. I will use a plagiarism check website to look through my students papers. Then as a consequence added on to the school policies, I would automatically set up a parent teacher meeting to discuss the reprimands of the level of seriousness this will be in the child's future years of schooling if this issue is repeated. By doing so, it will set a standard for the specific student and other students to understand how serious this issue is, I could even give examples of older students and what their consequences have been to show them not to continue down this track. Then there is student privacy in which can protected by using private class accounts, which can not be seen by the public. By setting up private student accounts for our class, students will remain private and they can't interact with the public by being set up in a class account which I have control over. This is sort of like parental controls but for teachers on certain platforms, just like this one, Blogger.com. 

    I loved exploring word and building my classroom newsletter. I felt like I branched out and tried new things in which I will definitely use in the future. In my past experiences, just to make it easier on myself and find a quick solution, I would look up newsletter templates online and fill them in with my own words to send home with my students. This was due to not having a full understanding of how to create my own newsletters, which is completely personalized to my class and my theme. Although, this is the best newsletter I have created thus far, there is still a lot of room for improvement. The first thing I would fix would be giving more room on the parent fill-out form at the bottom. I could do some shifting and adjusting to make that work better in the future. I actually set up my newsletter to correspond with my current class so in the future I will continue adding in graphics and adjusting things to be more appealing, easy to understand, and grouping topics with each other to make it clearer for parents.