Blog Journal 2

I did not use MS Word until I was in college the first time around in 1993.  As a student, Word has been used merely as a simple word processing program, used to type papers and do simple grammatical and spelling checks.  In fact, I’m typing this in Word now.  Teachers have used it in a similar way from what I’ve seen, as a word processing program to set up handouts and tests.  I believe my experiences missed the greater part of its use, as in High school, it wasn’t much of a thing, and now, most items from teachers are done using PowerPoint, Excel, and other more graphical programs.

I have literally no experience with the use of copyright and fair use in an educational sense that I am aware of.  I know the general idea, that copyright can be waived in educational use or for parody, but that is pretty much the extent of my knowledge.  I assume that the material would need to be placed into an educational context and adjusted as such, that straight plagiarism would still be off limits.  In general, I think it would be helpful to try and stick to creative commons things for education, which would pose no problems at all unless you intended to profit off their use.

Academic honesty – This is becoming much simpler and more difficult at the same time.  Easier, because there are literally hundreds of plagiarism checking programs like TurnItIn and Viper available, and many for free.  Also, it can be hard though since there are so many more sources available for free on the internet, that students can pull information from sometimes very obscure sources.  Also, the programs all depend on algorithms, and some are better suited to different uses.  As for cheating, again, this is getting harder to control these days with the proliferation of small internet-connected devices.  From my time observing classes, the most common reaction seems to be to roll with it and make many tests open-note.  I have seen teachers erect barriers between students, though that seems to make using a smart device for cheating even easier since the view to the teacher is usually blocked also.  I am unsure of how to combat this to be completely honest.  An easy partial solution, since I plan on teaching history, would be to have more essay tests, where the use of such devices would not be either as easy or as helpful as multiple choice or fill in the blank tests.

Privacy – Privacy is a serious issue in this day with the massive increase in social media sites that are often either hacked or willingly sell their user data to other companies.  The irony of the great wide web, free and anonymous, is that it is rapidly becoming neither of these things.  Too often your info is getting out there, regardless of your intentions.  In the classroom, with the rapidly expanding use of internet-based interactive activities and homework, you run the risk of exposing your student’s data to unscrupulous people.  There are partial defenses such as VPNs, but these are only partial solutions and the only sure-fire way to maintain your student’s privacy is to not use the web-based resources available.  Perhaps the best solution to this is to use the resources, but to do so using a single classroom access point.  You can use a classroom login that contains no student data at all.  You would lose the personal interaction that students could get with programs, but still gain the benefit of the programs overall.