Blog Journal 3

Learning about copyright and what is considered fair use is crucial to know to respect other people's work. After all, learning about intellectual property and how to use it aligns with the ISTE standard of being a digital citizen.  One way I can exercise fair use in my instruction is by creating my own assignments and adding a watermark to them. That way other people would be able to tell if my work was stolen because they will see a paper with my watermark on it. Not to mention that students wouldn't have access to answer keys. As for my students' work, I want to encourage them to build good habits in using other people's work. For instance, in the context of school projects and presentations, I think I would recommend my students use stock images from websites like Pexels instead of cropping out watermarks off of photos found on Google. 

Technology isn't perfect by any means, so student privacy can be compromised if it's used in education. For instance, when a student's name is entered into a computer to log into a student's account, hackers can use it to compromise a student's identity. I think the best idea to avoid student's names being put at risk is to create a unique username for each student. The first part of the username would begin with the animal name of the school's mascot (for example: tiger) and then the second part would be a unique three-digit number assigned to each student (tiger_294). Each student's username would be linked to their student ID so the school can identify them.

Generative AI is a technological advancement that listens to our every command and gives corresponding answers. I believe that generative AI could be used in the classroom, as long the students understand that it can't be used for academic dishonesty. I think the risk of using AI to cheat in school is unfortunately imminent, but that shouldn't be a reason to keep AI out of the classroom. Imagine an assignment where students have to draw a picture based on a description. I think the generative AI that creates images could be used to give students an idea about what they could have drawn (of course, it would be solely a suggestion and students are welcome to use their imagination).

Overall, the newsletter was a fun assignment. Making the newsletter was indeed a practice for the future because I expect to create a lot of flyers for my assignments. I made the newsletter for a 6th-grade class, so I didn't want to make it look too serious but also not too childish. What helped was just making a theme based on a subject that I liked and had a lot of information. I'm really interested in space, so that's the theme of my newsletter (pictured below, apologies for the blurriness but you can see that it's space themed).

I feel like my strategy for making the newsletter was helpful, but I want to be open to my students' feedback so I can modify my future newsletters to make them want to read them. For example, if a student told me that my newsletter was too distracting, then I could probably consider using less colors.