Copyright - a big deal!!!!!

   Our class about Copyright was fun and really eye-opening for me. I was surprised to learn that even if a teacher just uses some copyright material to illustrate a class (in a power point presentation, for example) that he/she gives every year, they should by law ask permission to do so, but it is ok if you use the material for just ONE lesson only. Another thing that amazed me was the fact that if a teacher wants to pass a movie to his/her students, unless it is part of the curriculum, the teacher should ask for the license to show the movie to his/her class. Also, I found it really interesting to hear the examples of problems caused by parents regarding copyright violation.

  Everyday we see copyright violations in schools done by students and teachers, such as photocopy of materials for instruction purpose (instead of buying the whole book), use of music, movies, images to illustrate a presentation used every year by a teacher, use of music as part of a video made by students and presented at school, etc. Out of the Academic world things are even worse: people download videos, music, images without permission or copy software programs to be installed in more than one computer; people copy recipes and publish as their own; people copy paintings (if they are art students), and the list goes on and on. But, for me, in the web is where nowadays most of the copyright violations happen, because of the easy access to the information and the illusion that one is protected by his/her anonymaty.

   I think, as educators, we have to teach our students about copyright, because the general population (including most of the parents) doesn’t realize how serious it is and how it really applies for almost every creative work out there. We can do it by showing them videos about it from youtube, saying that you can just do that using internet connection, not downloading it, because it would be an infraction, and also we could ask students to be in the “artist’s” shoes, making them express what would be their feeling if anyone stole their work. Anyway, I would show them some real shocking examples of copyright violation and their consequences, and then ask them to reason about it, because they take all the materials in the web for granted, so they must learn that here in the US copyright violation is really a big deal.

After this week experience I made my decision

When my principal asked to write him our opinion about switching to google docs and spreadsheet in our school district, I thought it would be a little hard to choose a side, but after using my google docs and spreadsheet this week, I decided that it would be to risky to make the switch. My point is that sometimes (and it is not rarely) the site is not working properly and it makes our work more time consuming, once you have to redo the project many times to try to make it work (this was exactly what happened to me this week). I’m sure google docs and spreadsheets are a great tool that we can use in the process of completing a group assignment, because everyone in the group can enter their findings and share it with the teacher. However, I wouldn’t just save the final project in google docs or spreadsheet, because if something goes wrong with the site and you can’t access it you are in trouble. Another thing is that both google docs and mainly google spreadsheet are very simple programs, missing a lot of cool features that are present in office word or excel. The charts in google spreadsheet are not so elaborated and many of the changes one can do in excel, they don’t work in google. I know that google docs and spreadsheet is free, but as people say: the result will be as good as what you can afford, so being free you can’t expect to have very nice and elaborated projects done with them. So, for me, google docs and spreadsheet is great to be used to share your project with people while doing it, but definitely I would use office word and excel for my final projects. Time and effort are pricey for me, I wouldn’t want to pay that price. 

Some Ideas of using Excel in the classroom

Excel is such a versatile and useful program not just for businesses and school administration, but also for classroom use. Teaching students how to use many of its features and utilities is an opportunity to teach the Net-genders something new for them, thus have them more interested in our classes. Here are some ideas of how to incorporate Excel in our curriculum.

·        We can use Excel to create a spreadsheet of vocabulary entries in English and their correspondent in a foreign language, as one of the final assignments after reading a small book in that foreign language, making it easier to organize it alphabetically.

·        We could also use Excel to collect and organize data of a poll for the school board of students’ election, and use these data to a math class in which percentage would be taught.

·        Excel would be useful for student’s groups keep track of their fund raisings, giving them also the opportunity to present their data in charts, and the data could be used by teachers to teach math or the value of money.

·        Music teachers could use Excel to make students complete pre made charts with the notes

and their values, as an reinforcement activity.

• Teachers could use Excel spreadsheet to make children think about logic, using the feature of “recognizing your analogy”, as for example when you write some months or numbers. Teacher could ask students to explain the logic recognized by Excel, or could ask the students to foresee the logic it would use next.

There are so many ways we could use Excel in our curriculum, those are just some simple, not very time-consuming examples of it. Giving it a try, we could see how useful and fun it is to use it with students.

I use social bookmarking!!!

Social bookmarking is a relatively new (couple of year-old) way of bookmarking your favorite web sites or pages.  It’s called social bookmarking, because you save and categorize (by tagging them) your bookmarks on a computer network, such as Del.icio.us, BlinkList, Simpy or Diigo (the one our professor use in class), that allows you to access that list of bookmarks from any computer and other people can make use of your own bookmark, as well as you do. It’s a great example of R/W web.

What is really interesting about it is the tagging. Using technical but also more generic words to categorize your bookmarks, you can search the sites that are related to a matter much more easily, instead of having to create many different folders and copy each bookmark for each folder that it relates to.

 I think it’s a great way to have access to information that other teachers found interesting and, in a very informal way, have a “peer-evaluation” on a variety of sites. Also the fact that you can search for the tags is a time saver, and that’s a big help for us as grad students and teachers, as what is always lacking for us is time. It’s a great tool and I’m already using it for my other classes. 

Great Goggle Doc!!!!!

For me it was quite easy to use Google Doc for our Lesson Plans Project. It’s like a simpler “version” of OfficeWord. The cool thing for me was to share and publish in the web. It’s very nice to know that we can create a document and just share with some interested people or simply publish in the Web without having a hard time of e-mailing it to everybody. I guess it’s going to be a great tool for my classes and studies for sure. Great learning this week!!!

TEK tools, an opportunity to teach them something new

Thinking about what Wesley Freyer states, we really can create a more student-centered courses with the use of the TEK tools, courses that will make the Net Geners more literate in “traditional/ essential” knowledge, as well as, in digital knowledge. But to achieve that, teachers will have to learn how to use more engaging and complex tools, so they can also amplify their (students) digital knowledge, once it’s said that the Net Geners know how to use well just simple tools (even if when they are asked, they answered that they knew how to use more complex tools pretty well, what some training programs found untrue).

Another thing teachers will have to do is to become more digital authors and producers, not only digital consumers. A good way to do that is using the Librarian 2.0, the Googledocs, the Wikipedia and the Blogs. Those are great tools to make not just the students to write more, but also the teachers, who could share their ideas and lessons with peers and other students, making the process of planning a lesson much more interesting.

“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”

“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”, I scratched my head as I stood at the counter. Check… Check… I vaguely remembered seeing an unused checkbook tossed carelessly in the trunk of my car that morning. But even if I could locate it, I couldn’t be sure it was in the right sequence. Or that I could even remember how to use the darn thing.”, said Carie Windham

As I said before, I really feel myself as an immigrant not just here in the United States, but also a digital immigrant everywhere, as described by Prensky, because definitly I don’t speak “fluently” the same “language” of the Net Geners, as Carie Windham described so well in her article. It’s not just their “language” that is different, their experiences, their concepts, their daily life are so different from mine that it makes our perspective at least a little diverse. For me, the technology is really an up to date tool that can help me to reach my goals more easily, but differently from the Net Geners I know what is life without all these technologies (I know how to use a check book, rsrsr), I don’t take them for granted. Like the Net Geners, I really enjoy what the technology can do for me, for my work, for my grad studies and for my daily life, but in order to enjoy it I have to “learn” this new language, try to use it as much as possible to become more fluent… it’s a hard but at the end rewarding work.

I agree with them when we talk about on-line courses, if the course is not engaging and challenging, it’s just a matter of difference of the physical space where you are taking the course, with one more negative point for the on-line course: you don’t have the peer’s interaction as you could have in a “boring” traditional course.

So, for me technology is a wonderful and engaging tool that can really make a lesson more interactive and interesting, but the teacher role is always very crucial to achieve that, without his knowledge and creativity, you can have a very “boring” and superficial “high tech” course. I really agree with most of their wishes of more moderate use of technology in the classroom, the only thing is that, I can also really appreciate a brilliant but “boring” traditional lecture, because I’m fluent in that language.