#2: Microsoft Word, Copyright and Fair Use, and Twitter!!

All throughout my high school, and even my elementary and middle school, career I have been using Microsoft Office's Word for many projects and papers. I continue to use it as a college student as well. What I've mostly used it for is writing essays. Typically, my teachers wanted us to use it for our papers and type in 12 point Times New Roman font. I know many of the features on Word as far as how to set up the style of the paper, fonts, and how to make other cool stuff such as worksheets and brochures. There were a couple projects I had as a student where I had to make brochures on Word. I think my teachers mainly used Microsoft Word for making worksheets, quizzes, tests, a typed out syllabus, letters home to parents, permission slips, and more I'm probably forgetting. Word is a really useful tool for in the classroom and educational purposes.

Copyright and fair use materials were used on a daily basis by teachers and students in my educational career. My teachers would show us movies on whatever subject we were learning, for example the entertaining "Bill Nye the Science Guy" to teach us all the cool things about science. They would use books to teach us with or for us to read as part of the curriculum, for example in fourth grade we read the book "Bridge to Terebithia". Using movies and books as part of the curriculum falls under the second code in Best Practice in Fair Use, "employing copyrighted material in preparing curriculum materials" (centerforsocialmedia.org). As a student I relied on copyright and fair use material to be used in projects. This falls under the fourth code in Best Practice in Fair Use, "student use of copyrighted materials in their own academic and creative work" (centerforsocialmedia.org). An example of me doing this would be using a picture from the internet in a PowerPoint presentation project or having copyrighted music playing in the background of a movie I made. As a teacher I would obviously use the concepts brought up in the Best Practice in Fair Use. I would use copyrighted and fair use material in the appropriate manner. I'd probably be incorporating a lot of books, movies, internet sources, and pictures into my curriculum and course materials but as long as they benefit my objective goal and subject that I'm teaching I would be allowed to do that. I would also teach my students the proper way to incorporate copyright and fair use material into their own creative works. I would make it very clear that they can only use the copyrighted media material in an appropriate manner just as I would have to, which means in a way that supports their own original creative works, not in a way that "substitutes" it, as brought up in the fourth code of Best Practice in Fair Use.

Before the Twitter assignment, I honestly had no clue that Twitter could be used in the professional workforce, especially in education. Obviously, Twitter is a great way to communicate and to share thoughts and ideas publicly, but now I know this can be done in the professional educational field as well as just for social reasons. On Twitter you can follow other educators and get insight from them, you can follow educational boards or teacher unions, you can network with other teachers and get inspiration from each other, you can tweet your own ideas or share other people's ideas to benefit your followers (which may be students or co-workers), and you can use it to set up a classroom Twitter page or something similar to share updates with parents, students, and faculty. I think if I were to use Twitter as a teacher I would mainly use it to network with other teachers and faculty members and to learn more about current events in education and to stay updated on all of the latest politics in education. I might also want to use it as a way to post about what is happening in my classroom and as a way to keep parents up to date on what we're currently learning about or upcoming events with the school.