Blog 3: Fair Usage and Creations

Copyright focuses on the owner of the material being the only person that can distribute, sell, or copy the material while fair use focuses on being able to use or copy the said material for specific purposes without having to pay for it such as reviewing or criticizing the material. As a teacher, I would try my best to create all of my own material and if I can't, then I will follow the necessary steps to make sure that the material that I am using is being used for the correct purpose. If possible, I will contact the person for permission to copy, distribute, or use the material for educational purposes. As for my students, I will teach them about the significance of copyright and fair use so that they understand both what it means and the consequences of using it incorrectly. I will push them to create their own works as much as possible and to do their best to be creative since although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it can get one in trouble.

Academic dishonesty is something that I believe needs to be stressed about in early education. With students having more and more access to technology, they are able to find anything they want with just a few clicks of the mouse. Such possible finds could be the answers to a quiz, an essay that talks about the exact topic that they need to write about for their history report. Some students may have the idea of just copying and pasting everything without even giving it a second thought. The problem that this poses in an educational setting is that they will end up not learning anything. Something that my English teacher did to combat this was that we needed to turn in all of our papers handwritten regardless of the length. Her thought behind this was that even if it was copied word for word, at least we would have to read it and write it down thus learning something. Something that another teacher of mine did was run the entire paper through turnitin, a software used to look up how much of a paper was copied from another piece of text. This will be the route that I will take in the future since I would like my students to have the ease of typing but to be aware that their works will be scanned from beginning to end. Student privacy is something else that is a current problem within our classrooms, since some students may not know how to keep their information private. For that, I would reserve a day in class to both talks about academic dishonesty and student privacy and show them the various ways that they keep their information away from people that may want to take it and use it for bad reasons.

The newsletter design was something both fun and challenging in the sense that it is something that I didn't know how to do on software that I knew well, or that I thought I knew at least. The way that I would improve my newsletter in the future would be to have a draft that I can edit easily and just add new information without having to start the whole thing from scratch again. The skills I learned can be used in the future in the sense that I will know what type of information I have to show the reader, know what to keep and what to leave out, and how to keep it efficient yet aesthetically pleasing.