Blog Post #3

    Copyright and fair use are meant to protect creators and prevent their work from being used or altered unjustly. As a teacher I would probably go to public forums or look up examples of ideas of how to teach that other teachers or even students have tried and liked. The unique design may be copyrighted, but the idea is not. I can design my own class materials, but there's nothing stopping me from taking inspiration from others. This is something that I'll make sure to teach the kids too, probably through art by giving them a prompt and letting them draw what that makes them think or feel, letting them take inspiration from the words, but not just copying them or another student's work. The biggest thing that I learned about copyright is that there's no official office you need to go to to argue your case for why the copyright should be accepted, you just file it in online and boom, it's done!

    For implementing technology in the classroom, ideally I would be able to take my future class to a computer lab to give them time to play educational games, or for supplemental learning. It would also give the added benefit of making sure that all of my students would be able to reliably use a computer at a level appropriate for their age group! The main roadblock to this, however, would be the lack of funding that schools tend to receive, but there are solutions to this! Instead of a full computer lab, we might only be able to get 2-3 computers per core-subject teacher, but even that would be enough to rotate the kids through in groups and give them a turn while the other children worked on other projects. Alternatively, I myself could purchase probably 3-4 tablets for the classroom that stay in there, and are child-locked from downloading more games, but that I could still put educational games on to give them all a bit of exposure to technology that not all of them may get at home.

    While working on the newsletter I certainly got more experience working with the Word app, rather than just using the desktop version that I tend to. I got to improve my skills in inserting images and textboxes, icons, and even playing with the fonts and spacing. These skills can be used later in life while making official newsletters for class, or just for designing aesthetically pleasing works. It will also come in handy for being able to find work arounds in other areas, the sheer amount of frustration I had while trying to find something, anything that would work in lieu of other methods that proved futile. Patience is a lesson hard won, but I earned that dang it!