blog 2

As a student, I use MS Word almost every day. I may actually use it more than the average student because of the nature of my major: a liberal arts degree. Writing papers, taking notes, even right now I am using Microsoft Word as a template for my thoughts. Teachers also use MS Word in this way. They take notes for the class on MS Word, and use the other templates Word offers to teach the class about letters, resumes, etc. Not to mention all the tools offered in the program, such as charts and tables. 

I have always known that copyright and fair use rules were important, especially as technology becomes more and more relevant to the classroom. That is why citations and references are crucial in presentations, papers, and any other piece where a student or teacher may utilize an outside source that has been copyrighted. The CSMI article specifies that fair use is not exactly a restriction, and that it varies based on the diverse ways of using copyrighted information and all the circumstances involved (CSMI). As a teacher in my classroom, when it comes to my students and I creating our own works, I would just try to make sure that everyone was educated and up to date of the correct way of giving credit where it is due. 

There are clearly some issues when it comes to implementing technology into schools. Most of these, in my opinion, can be obliterated with the correct education and familiarity. Copyright is definitely one of the issues with technology implementation in classrooms. A solution to this issue is to simply make it relevant to students, and to show them that they can easily work around it. I think the copyright laws and fair use policy sound scary, yet once they are explained and students can be taught how to work with them, I can’t imagine the issue being a large setback. Student privacy is also an issue to implementation. I would solve that by using only very safe websites, and making sure that students know the risk at hand when they start exploring the web. One last issue would be cyberbullying, which is extremely relevant to our society today. To help with this issue, I would first begin by attempting to talk the students out of that on an emotional level; simply discussing the dangers and evils of bullying. Then, I would explain that just because there is a screen, they are still responsible for their actions online just as they would be offline.