My school is finally jumping on the smart board bandwagon and installing several dozen Hitachi Starboards over the coming months. My understanding is that by the time the next school year starts, every instructional space will have one, and that this is part of an initiative to have our school be a model of technology use in our city (I would rather have a one-to-one program, but I’m not one to inspect the oral cavities of equine gifts). I was fortunate enough to be in the initial pilot group, so in mid February the school installed one in my room along with an Elmo document camera. I didn’t have any formal training for the Starboard since I was out of town on school trips and conferences for both sessions, but I’ve been playing around with it and collaborating with my common planning colleague. I’ve always thought that smart boards had more applications in the maths and sciences where graphing was important, but I’ve also seen several distinct uses in high-school level humanities that I presented to my department at the last meeting: Categorization, Annotation, and Visual Notes.
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Daily Archives: April 14, 2012
Copyright, Mashups, Plagiarism, and Information Management
Here’s a perspective on the role of copyright and the new digital skills that we should be teaching to our students:
Memorizing is a necessary skill. Accessing our memory is indeed quicker than accessing the net. Whether that information is accurate is another story. The problem is that in this Information Age too many educators are only teaching and testing memory skills, wallowing in that lower end of Bloom’s. If they’re not teaching students to discover, curate, and manage information, though, they’re missing the realism in GenZ’s future. This is also necessary before they move to the upper end of Bloom’s. Information management is the memory’s next door neighbor.
(Read more at Getting Smart: Generation Z: The Biggest Cheaters Since Homer.)
Renfro goes on to aver that “Teaching about copyright and proper content sharing should be an essential standard. Students should respect the work of others just as they will want to protect their own work that they upload to the net.” This begs Week 3’s assessment question: How do we teach copyright in Asia, in countries where international copyright law is not followed to begin with? What is our obligation as educators?
I think the issue should be separated as Renfro unintentionally does. In other words, we should consider 1) copyright law, and 2) proper content sharing with the understanding that 1) Copyright law should NOT be universally taught, and 2) Proper content sharing SHOULD be a constant, though not necessarily central, part of our curriculums.
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