December 2021 – My Journey with Digital Learning and Leading

Wrapping it Up

It is hard to believe that I am in my last week of the Digital Citizenship course. Time has really flown by with this class. I feel like I am walking away with a wealth of knowledge from this class. I have no doubt that I will be utilizing everything I learned in this class, not only in my classroom, but in my future.

Week 1 was an introduction to what digital citizenship is and how we can become better digital citizens. We know what it takes to be a good citizen in our everyday life. Let’s be real, we were all wanting that citizenship award back in elementary school, right? These days though, it seems that once people get behind a screen, we lose focus on what it takes to be a good citizen. All of a sudden we are ten feet tall and bulletproof and in reality, we really are not.

Week 2 was evaluating our digital footprint. If you have never put your name in a search engine, I encourage you to do that as soon as you can. It is very important to try and maintain a positive digital footprint. It is smart to always go back and check this to see what is actually out there about you. You never know when your boss or future boss will do the same just to see what type of person you are behind the screen. They want to know the real you, not the one you tried to sale to them in an interview.

Week 3 was learning about copyright laws, and let me be frank right now, this could have been a whole class in itself. There was so much information about the history of copyright laws and how they really haven’t changed much since its creation back when George Washington was president. We learned about the different types of licenses you can get and how each one brings something different to the table. We explored two case scenarios to be able to see which were copyright infringements and which were not. This was difficult for me, if I am being honest. I plan to do some more digging so that I can fully understand these laws to better help my fellow educators.

Week 4 was an exploration into cyber-bullying, which was probably my favorite lesson for the course because of the importance of the topic. This is a topic that hits home with me since I am presently in a high school classroom and have three children of my own. These students have no compassion or empathy towards others. They post something on their social media because they think it is funny and have no regards on how it makes others look. Currently our school is battling with a couple of social media trends. One is where students are taking pictures of people in the restroom. Several students have already been placed in our alternative education program for contributing to this trend. Another trend is where they take pictures of sleeping students and post to an Instagram hashtag created for the school. I actually heard students talking about this and giggling, and we had a very frank conversation about why they should not be doing this. We talked about how this infringes on privacy of others and the student posting does not have the permission from the sleeping student to post.

The social media world has exploded so quickly that no one was ready for what we are facing with cyber-bullying. Schools, parents, lawmakers were not anywhere near ready to combat this issue. It is imperative that schools take a stand and try to fix this issue before it gets more out of hand than it already is. The rate at which students are committing suicide is heartbreaking and we (teachers, parents, and students), as a whole united group, need to work together to help prevent cyber-bullying.

In week 5 we had to do our culminating project which was us picking a stakeholder group and presenting a lesson over digital citizenship. My audience was my students, because I feel that it is important for them to realize what happens when they are not good digital citizens. This lesson has to start somewhere, so why not me? Click on the link to view my project.

Culminating Project- https://edpuzzle.com/media/61be44819702c542c41a1c2d

Cyber-bullying

As a teacher at a high school, I see first-hand the seriousness of trying to address our students’ cyber-bullying and sexting issues. I find that some students do not have compassion for others. It is like we are living in a world where it is every man for themselves. Students find it too convenient to sit behind a screen and say horrible things about one another or to share a text or picture that was only meant for one person. They think that by simply making a fake account to attack another student is funny and nobody will ever find out that they created the account. They show no empathy towards anyone else’s feelings, which I find scary.

This week’s assignment hit home to me. Although I did not grow up in a time with cyber-bullying, I have three teenagers, which one has special needs, that I constantly worry about. I try to be a positive role model for them and monitor their accounts, but I know I will not find it all. All I can do is hope that if my kids begin having issues, I am quick to catch it and start intervention to stop it before it gets to the point of Ryan Halligan. Ryan Halligan was a thirteen-year-old boy who was not only being bullied in person at school, but being cyber-bullied too. Unfortunately, he did not feel as if he had any other options except to take his own life. My heart aches for him and his family. His father has taken this horrible situation and is trying to prevent the same fate to happening to others. He is an advocate on bullying and has been one of the biggest pushers for the Vermont Bullying Prevention Bill and has also led the law’s passage on mandatory suicide prevention education in public schools. You can read more about Ryan’s Story by clicking the link provided.

I know schools are doing what they can to help with all types of bullying, but I cannot help but feel more can be done. I believe staff should be trained on how to properly recognize signs of bullying early on and try to intervene at the earliest stages. Schools can make safe spaces to help students feel safe in reporting bullying issues either for themselves or others. Schools can have a hotline, an intervention box, or an online form that can be filled out and if a student wants to remain anonymous, they can. I also feel that if we can begin a Digital Citizen Class that is required for all students, this may help. We can teach them how to be responsible and positive citizens in the digital world. Teach them that although they think their digital words are harmless, they are effecting others in negative ways. I also believe that administrators should come together and develop a discipline ladder for offenders.

After this week, I have learned that we need to work with implementing a better system for cyber-bullying. No child should ever feel that the only way out is to take their own life. My heart is breaking for these families that have lost their children and my heart also breaks for those families currently going through these issues.

Copyrights or Copywrongs

Our focus for this week was Copyrights and Copywrongs, which honestly is something I have never really gave much thought to. I can say that this week was definitely a challenge for me. I feel that all of the information that was given to me to read through and watch is still swimming frantically around in my head and I am trying to piece it all together. What is copyright, the history of copyright, am I committing copyright infringements or plagiarism, or even both? What is considered Fair Use and what falls under copyrights and which creative common license does it fall under? Is your head spinning yet, because I know mine is?

Let’s start with the obvious, what is a copyright? A copyright, as defined by the United States Copyright Office, is the protection provided by U.S. laws to authors of “original works of authorship,” including literacy, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. Pretty simple right? I have learned this week that it is not all black and white, there are some grey areas that help complicate things. In reading Copyright Basics, it helped shed some light on a few things. It outlined what can be copyrighted and things that are not copyrighted. This article also explained who can obtain a copyright, how to secure a copyright, how long a copyright protection last, among other interesting topics. Since the link is in my college course I cannot link it for your review, however, I invite you to search Copyright Basics on the internet and several articles will come up that will help you understand if you are not familiar with copyrights.

We then had to read the white papers that was produced by the Hudson Institute. The purpose of this article was to highlight the importance of possible separating the US Copyright Office away from the US Library of Congress. Although this article is lengthy, it brought up some very good points and after reading it, I could see the argument for this. The initial copyright law was signed by President George Washington, yes you read that right, George Washington, and even though time has changed dramatically since then, there has been little change to copyright laws. Our world is not the same world that it was in 1790 and let’s be honest it not the same world that it was in 1990. With the development of the internet, things have exponentially changed. So if our world is changing this fast, why not this particular law and where it is housed.

Did you know there is a fine line between copyright infringement and plagiarism? Me neither, but once I read the article written by Jonathan Bailey, it made more since. It is possible to be guilty of one and not the other, but it is also possible to be guilty of both, depending on when whatever you are doing was copyrighted. It’s crazy how this can happen.

Next up, the Fair Use Doctrine. This doctrine allows the use of copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder for certain purposes, but it has to be limited and for a transformative purpose (Lamar 2021). Part of our assignment this week, we were given two case scenarios and we had to be able to approach the situation from a technology administrator. We had to explain what was wrong with the situation and explain how we would fix it. These were a little rough for me, because I had to spend time looking at each book, website, or movie and reference the copyright table Lamar provided me so that I could come to the determination if what the teacher was using fell under the Fair Use Doctrine or was it copyrighted.

As stated above, this week was a challenge for me, but I feel that I learned a lot about copyright laws and even the history of copyrights. I never gave it much thought and really had not seen the importance to me or my students, but now, I see the importance and now I feel that I could correctly use media, written works or even audio works in my classroom. If you are a teacher like me, I invite you to read up of copyrights, you may find out that you are also not doing things correctly.

Reference

Admin, & *, N. (2021, February 5). The importance of copyrights, Patents and trademarks in business. PTes College. Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://ptes.edu.in/the-importance-of-copyrights-patents-and-trademarks-in-business/.

Bailey, J. (2013, October 7). The difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism. Plagiarism Today. Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/07/difference-copyright-infringement-plagiarism/.

Lamar University, (2021, November 29). Week 1 Lecture_Text [Document]. Blackboard.