Technology Use In the Classrooms

 Greetings!

Once again, in another blog we focus on the different experiences in the realm of teaching! When we think of copyright and fair use we often bring to mind the music industry and the right of property that many well known productions have. However, copyright comes to play in many other things including classrooms. The books we read are subject to being copyrighted materials as well as many videos we may watch and articles we may use in school. It makes you wonder, how do educators find a loophole in having free access to many of these things? As a teacher, the way I would deal with copyright and fair use is by ensuring that I find mediums or websites that themselves might be allowed to use certain copyrighted material. One upper hand I would have in the classroom is making use of the public domain which provides a loophole to the copyright issue. Seeing that many productions such as documentaries, YouTube videos and Google are out for public use, I can take advantage of a these mediums to incorporate creative material for my classroom lessons without having to worry about actually facing copyrighted material. I could also look for similar yet different material to substitute for what I might need. 

As it speaks to technology use within schools, there are many dangers that can occur. Some examples include but are not limited to: Academic dishonesty, cyberbullying and easy distractions. If I have a future classroom, one main thing that could potentially affect my classroom flow would be decreased productivity because of excessive technology use. First and foremost, I am a person that likes the old fashion way of teaching. Unless, I am forced to utilize various digital applications, I would love to stick to activities involving pen and paper especially with the age range that I would prefer to teach. Technology would be very irrelevant to many of the lessons I would have planned for the children I would teach. Therefore, I would limit distractions by just not allowing phone use.

As the years progress, so does the increase of use in artificial intelligence programs. One of the most popular ones now is ChatGPT, a generative AI used by many. Generative AI in my opinion is truly unnecessary. It just contributes to student laziness and incompetence. I think and say that those successful people that lived before us and continued their studies did just fine with books and brains. They did not use technology to the extent at which youths are presently so dependent on. So, in my opinion, it helps students easily do more work, but it hurts their ability to actually learn. AI is overall just becoming too much.

Lastly, as I work on the Newsletter Design, I struggle and am far from being complete. I am not tech savvy as many. However, my eyes are opened to the many features that Microsoft Word possesses to create so much in one app. Its creative potential is wonderful. In the future, my newsletter should look way more professional than it does now. The skills I've learned in this assignment are not very much seeing that we only had one class that we went over it but using it as a stepping stone to master Microsoft Word is most definitely a valuable skill for the future.

Here is my newsletter so far...haha...