Technology in the Classroom, As a Student and a Teacher (BP2)

Throughout my years of schooling, the use of Microsoft Word has been imperative for success. From writing essays to printing images, Word has been used in my everyday life ever since I can remember. My earliest memory using it was for the purpose of learning how to type. In elementary school, we had a technology class where we were learning how to type and often did typing exercises in Word. As a college student, I use it for almost everything. I have seen many teachers and professors use it as well. From what I have been able to tell, they use it for many quizzes, test, and worksheets. I have also witnessed them using it to type out emails and use the grammar and spell checking tool before pasting it into the email.

As I was discussing with a peer in class, the earliest I can remember using things such as TurnItIn and Purdue OWL was middle school. We learned in Language Arts classes how to cite things using EasyBib, which I later learned probably isn't the best resource. As a teacher in the future, I would hope by the time I was teaching them they would already know the rules of being a digital citizen. If they didn’t, I think I would make them a little cheat sheet on the steps to citing sources and what you can use from a website and what you can't. This way they can keep that cheat sheet with them for as long as they need to. My AP Calculus teacher did the same thing for us by creating a cheat sheet with equations and steps on the calculator.

Copyright can be a pretty simple issue to solve. For example, if you are reading something in an article that you would like to use in a paper, you either quote it and cite it, or reword it and cite it. By doing this, you would then be following Academic Honesty because you would be being upfront about where and how you got the information you are using. This also goes for presentations and speeches. You need to announce where or who you got quotes or information from. The issue of cyberbullying can simply be solved by the long-lasting rule of thumb that goes, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all." Whether you follow this rule in daycare, school, or in the workplace, it also applies to the internet. The only difference being, if you say something not nice on the internet, it can be saved and follow you forever. This would be a very important rule in my classroom as I plan to teach psychology and there are many negative stigmas around mental health and disorders. I would emphasize the importance of having a positive and non-judgmental environment.