We must respect copyrights and fair use laws for many reasons. Copyright laws were put in place to keep people from copying other peoples work and passing it off as their own. What you find when you are researching a topic is a product of someone else's hard work and it is not fair to them for you to turn it in as your own. While you may use a certain portion of the work, you still have to put forth an effort to get the assignment done. Doing your own work will also allow you to more understand the topic you are working on. Teaching this to students will have to be done in an interactive manner. The laws are not easy to understand and there are parts of the laws that most people don't know. Assigning groups and having students do projects allowing only a certain percentage of copyrighted material and then having the students explain the percentage they were able to use to the class can help teach the students of the different items that can be used.
Online safety in some ways will help keep cyberbullying to a minimum, but it is more than stopping cyberbullying. Online safety will also help keep viruses, spam, and spyware to a minimum. To do this, you must make sure your computer is equipped with the proper software to stop these items, whether with a firewall, antivirus/spyware software, or both. You can help keep the students and ourselves protected by stressing the importance of not post personal information online and by letting them know the dangers of being in chat rooms and watching who you accept as friends on facebook and other networking sites.
This weeks activities were very informative and brought to my attention the different rules about copyrights and fair use laws. The copyright bay activity was a different way to learn some of the laws and was a good change of pace from reading and listening to a person talk about different laws. The interactive learning aspect was used in a very effective manner. I learned the different laws and the amount of material you can use in assignments. I also learned that the manner and the audience you use the material also matters. I hope in my classroom I can create an interactive learning assignment to help my students learn about the laws discussed in this weeks lesson.
I agree with you in that online safety helps cyber bullying to a minimum. It only helps in preventing it but other measures also need to be taken. Social networking sites are the big issue now days but they are also now providing the option of viewing comments from others for approval of posting otherwise its up to the person to block the person and take matters into their own hands.
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