Journal 3

  Copyright protects an author/creator’s work to ensure that it won’t be sold or redistributed without giving proper credit. Fair Use makes it easy to use copyrighted materials without receiving permission from the creator. This only applies when the use of the copyrighted material meets the Fair Use guidelines/limits. When using copyrighted resources in the classroom, teachers often focus on the most vital information provided to ensure they are following the Fair Use guidelines. It’s extremely important that teachers incorporate the material into their lesson instead of relying solely on that resource. This also helps teach the students that it is okay to refer to outside sources as long as most of your work is based on your own ideas/knowledge. 

    Cyberbullying has been an issue in most schools since the implementation of technology into the classroom. Many young people seem to believe that a computer/tablet screen acts as a shield when interacting with others online. An exercise I believe would be useful to make students more aware of the impact of their words would be to act out instances of cyberbullying as well as some positive online interactions. I think this activity would be very successful in expressing the reality of online interactions and how our words do not lose meaning when typed instead of spoken. I feel as though decreased productivity has become an even larger issue since entering this state of online teaching and social distancing. It is easier to find motivation when you are surrounded by like-minded people and interacting/working with them in person instead of online. Once the zoom call is over, distractions are harder to resist and we don’t have our peers to keep us on topic. More group projects and opportunities to work in smaller break-out groups would help existentially in keeping students productive and involved in their study areas. 

    Designing my own newsletter helped immensely in becoming more comfortable with Word. MS Word’s hundreds of functions and abilities can be intimidating, but taking time out of each day over the past week was a good way to slowly introduce and practice using some of the application’s main features. I think that my new knowledge of MS Word will help me to create an even better newsletter next time. What I would like to learn about most before using Word again is using pictures/clipart from the internet. In any career I will more than likely use MS Word at least once, so it’s extremely important that I understand the basics of making an organized and easy-to-follow document. Even if I do not use MS Word in the future for some projects, being able to navigate and explore a new app as well as its features is a very important skill.