Blog Post #2

As a student Microsoft Office but especially Word has been an important tool in my life and has made writing and learning easier. This tool as a student has allowed for me to write papers with broken fingers and has allowed me to share my thoughts with partners if there is a group project requiring Word and we may not be able to meet to share the ideas in person. Word has also allowed for me to make mistakes and correct them easily without having to rewrite the entire paper like I would have had to without Word at my disposal. Teachers that I have had have also used Word to best benefit students with most of them using it to post assignments on their blackboards for all the students to find that way if you may not have understood it in class this may explain the point more clearly. Teachers have also use Word to make test and study guides but usually you can tell the more experienced teachers because of all my past teachers and professors the more experienced ones tended to use this tool more creatively and makes games and puzzles rather than just standard Word documents.

As a student in the 21st century copyright and fair use have always been a hot topic in all my righting and history classes, this is due to the nature of the world we live in and the relative ease it would be to copy and paste from a random website to make papers and research easier. From my experience I have never had a problem once it was explained why copyright is a big issue but in Elementary and Middle School when it was less clear it was easy for me to copy and paste because I didn't understand the belief that it was stealing even if it was on a public website. As a teacher I think I would explain the concept a little differently than my teachers explained it to me. My teachers tried to explain this issue as solely an online copyright issue how ever I think I would explain it using books rather with the internet, I think I would ask how they would feel if they wrote a book, got it published but it was never popular then another person came along and copied their book, even if they changed a few words, and published it and then that book was widely acclaimed and then ask how different this would be to pulling ideas straight out of a source and trying to pass it off as their own ideas. As a student I have witnessed issues with copyright from classmates being caught copyrighting to first being told to always put sources for pictures to now being told this falls under fair use educational purposes and these issues have also put some of my teachers in tight spots especially when it comes to knowing if to cite pictures or not in the classroom.

Some issues that come up are almost impossible to avoid in a world of technology but most of these issues can be solved with education of the issue and monitoring activity. One issue that comes up is copyright, I would attempt to deal with this issue by educating the kids on why this is important and how if caught using somebodies copyrighted works without citing the source it can ruin your education in higher schooling. Another issue would be Cyber-bullying, this a relatively new issue but a vital one to educate on and for this one I could give some real life examples of the consequences of Cyber-bullying and how those convinced of this crime were punished in real life to try and make the students understand that although it is online the consequences of this can be very real. Finally another issue that you might run into when trying to integrate technology into classrooms could be the Hacking and Malware that has always been an issue on the internet, with these issues rising however I would most likely spend a decent amount of time talking about this issue because not knowing how hacking and malware occur and can impact your life can leave you vulnerable to these people to pray on ignorance. Also because this can lead to identity theft and ruin your life I would spend time explaining how to spot malware bugs and how to put yourself in the best situation to avoid sites that are likely to give you malware to give them the best chance to avoid it.