Using Technology Appropriately in the Classroom
This weeks reading was Chapter 10, from Technology in Its Place. This chapter focuses on the legal issues around using technology in the classroom, both by students and teachers. The topics include copyrights, plagiarism, censorship, Internet filters, and intellectual freedom.
This chapter is VERY important to anyone who uses technology. Its vital that we give credit to those who did the work. I mean you wouldn’t want someone to claim something that you spent your precious time doing, would you? Its like when you are grading papers and you have a few without names, but you go ahead and grade them. Then in class you mention that you have so many papers without names and students come up and claim them. How many times have you caught a student trying to pass off the highest graded one as theirs even though you know its not??
It is important as teachers that we educate our students on how to appropriately use resources and give credit to those who deserve the credit. They need to understand that copying is the same thing as stealing and you will get in trouble for it.
It is equally important that we as teachers make sure we follow all copyright issues correctly. When we use movies, make photocopies, create webquests, etc…, we need to document the source or get written approval.
The other issue is blocked “Access Denied” websites. Its funny how many things we cannot access from school. The “Access Denied” screen comes up so often that even my Self Contained Special Education students know what it says and they read at a 7 year old level! It seems like everyday more and more websites get blocked. I wonder how they decide what to block. I mean the one’s I try to pull up are .edu sites and they still get blocked. The other issue with blocked sites is that, in order to get one unblocked we have to go through the county technology office and make a request and that could take weeks! Each school needs to be able to block and unblock sites, because each school is going to need to access different tools!
When we use technology in our classroom we need to demonstrate how to proper;y use and document it, as well as teach our students how to. It is another topic that will make life easier for them and they continue on with their future education.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Hello,
Isn’t it funny how the sites we want to use in lessons are frequently unavailable? I understand that the students should not have access to certain sites, but I wanted to include some old commercials (1960s-1980s) as part of my writing lessons, to address tone/targeted audience/purpose of writing. I had hoped to use some of the commercials as an introduction into having the class create their own commercials via digital cameras/Moviemaker software, but no easy way to pull these up from YouTube. I either have to copy them onto a CD at home or email the county tech coordinator, with specific details and ask to have that much released to my computer. I think it’s great and necessary to block things on the student computers, but on the teachers’ computers as well??
It is also essential to teach students to credit other people’s work! It becomes even more important for electronic documents, since kids find it harder to understand that what is on the computer “belongs” to someone, rather than holding a published book in their hands.
As far as citations are concerned, I would really, really, like to see one and only one form of citation to cover all material. Having learned one way in K-12, then another way in college, then MLA to help someone format their thesis and now the APA, I have trouble keeping it all straight! Even with the APA manual, I go crazy trying to find the correct form for the myriads of sources I find for my papers/projects. Why is there not one single form that we can learn in K-12, so that we don’t go crazy trying not to mix the various citation formats we learn through the years? Until my dream comes true, we must still see to it that students give credit where credit is due.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Actually, I should have phrased my last statement to say that students will have to suffer through multiple citation formats to give credit where credit is due.
Katherine