Week 5: Media and Information Literacy

This week we talked about designing instructional media. I never really thought about how much time goes into designing things such as powerpoint slides and presentations for large crowds. There are so many ways to get information out there to people from personal webpages to emails to online articles. Yet how you construct such resources is important as well, because it's important to get your point across in the simplest manner possible.
One day I will be designing Powerpoints for my classroom and it's important to know what works and what doesn't when it comes to design. Obviously when constructing a powerpoint it's crucial to find the right background and text colors. You want the font to be the right size for all eyes to read and you want to keep distracting symbols and pictures to a minimum.
This video I found on Youtube put together by UCLA students, explains how we get our information from various sources these days. There is so much information available to us. There was one quote that really got me thinking... "If you're not using a computer you're obsolete". It is apparent we rely heavily on computers this day for our information and communication, and it's very important you check the validity of these sites before believing them to be true, because almost anyone can put anything on the web.

Copyright and Fair Use

Federal Law enables us to take portions of copyrighted material for educational, news reporting, or for critcal review under the term "fair use". Here is "fair use" at it's finest, portrayed by Disney characters...

Week 4: Copyright Law, Plagiarism, and Ethical Issues

In class this week we covered the laws that govern technology and media. Unfortunately not everything can be simply copy and pasted. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act gives the owner of the material the authority to do and give others the use of their own work. Copyright protects original works of authorship which can include, among others, literary works, architectural works, and sound recordings. The safest way to keep out of trouble when it comes to copyright, is to get permission from the authors themselves.

As a future educator, I can see how learning about these legal issues relates to the education field. Teachers base their entire lessons on an assortment of ideas from various sources and they need to know how much of these sources they can use. Are teachers allowed to show entire videos in their classrooms? Can they make copies from pages in a book for their students? Can they print out lectures from other teachers and use them for their own lesson? Teachers benefit greatly (and keep themselves out of trouble) if they know the proper copyright laws, rules about plagiarism, and ethical issues that go along with technology and media.

This Copyright Chart gives examples of what is okay for teachers to use in their classrooms. I thought it was a good tool for teachers to use when they have questions about material they may want to use in their classrooms. For example if they want to show a video in class, they'll learn that under Section 110 of the Copyright Act they are unable to use the video for entertainment or as a reward. The video must also come from a non-profit educational institution (no wonder sometimes the most boring videos are shown in schools)... I think that all teachers should have a copy of this chart in their classrooms as a quick reference.