The Internet for Educators class has quite the agenda this week. Being the first week of the new semester, there was no wading into the course, we jumped right in! We began the week off with our first presenter, Dean Shareski. Dean posed some very simple yet difficult questions. The hand-in-hand questions that stuck out to me were the following: how is learning different now and why is it this way?
Learning is an ongoing and ever-changing part of society. The way we teach, the way we learn and the way we view education has adapted and been modified throughout history. Our values as communities and cultures have constantly been adjusted dependent on the era. I believe that current education is headed in a very positive and productive direction, however the future will always be the unknown. Currently we are starting to teach students skills that will (hopefully) carry through their adult life. These skills go beyond the curriculum material and into who each student is as an individual. We admire characteristics such as compassion, loyalty, dependability, honesty, effort, and determination, just to name a few. As a society, we value these traits in our workforce and are therefore attempting to create an ideal generation that is productive, peaceful and successful. As up-and-coming teachers we hope to affect our student's lives for more than the amount of time in which they are in our classroom.
Our second presenter of the week was Jon Finch. Jon had presented to a class I was in last year, so I was familiar with how his presentation was going to go. What I did not predict was the extent of the wake-up call he had in store for us.
Jon's presentation was an informal discussion about many aspects of education, one being copyright. Copyright was something that I have heard of many times, and understand how and why it is in place. What I didn't understand was how many restrictions teachers have when it comes to copyright and technology. The list of restrictions and obligations seems endless! Netflix, Songza, and iTunes can be great resources when used in the right way, but Jon seemed to put a quick end to those possibilities. As much as I felt a little defeated and frustrated, I found myself having to remember that Jon was only the bearer of bad news, not the creator. Jon went over MANY of the restrictions, regulations, and consequences of copyright, but I still find myself discovering new and annoying rules in the book he gave us. I left class feeling mainly frustrated. Why do they create so many great resources for a classroom if we can't use them? They don't expect me to actually pay for all of these, do they?
The Copyright presentation was extremely informative and great for us to know now rather than later. However, it left myself (and I'm sure others) wondering how we can get around the restrictions in our placement. Having your own classroom is a different situation, but being a student teacher doesn't allow for the extent of freedom we might have this coming September. I think copyright is something we should all keep in mind in the next few weeks, but I'm not sure what we can do to change anything...
The title of your post is very true, the presentations we were able to listen to last week were the first wake up calls of 2015. Being in the faculty and attending classes provides you with the basic warnings. I have yet to come across the warnings we got about Copyright from anyone other than from Jon Finch. It was really great that Mike was able to bring him in to speak to us both last year and this year. I was positive we were going to hear the same presentation as last year, an assumption I had made. Like most in our class, I was very shocked to learn about so many more DON'TS in our future classroom, don'ts I would not have ever guessed to have negative impacts. There are so many positive ways that sites like Netflix could be used in an Educational setting. I have taken the time to watch documentaries that I would love to show my class. I have struggled to find those exact documentaries on sites that I can use. It is situations like these where I wish there was away around the Copyright law.
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