Hello and welcome back!! Week 3, let's go!! As always, grab your cup of (iced) coffee and get ready to Chat With Lucy!!

Let's start off by talking about the famous application of MS Word. My goodness, I cannot even remember a time that I haven't been using Word for school. I clearly remember a President assignment on Theodore Rosevelt in the third grade that made me use Word- I got an A if you were wondering. So I have been using it since I was in elementary school for simple projects where I had to write a paragraph to a 20 page conspiracy theory paper in APA format during my senior year of high school. I would consider myself a low-key pro at Word after the thousands (okay maybe just hundreds) of assignments I have made on Word. I have written papers, resumes, brochures, posters, magazine covers, and so much more. It really is the perfect application that I would not know what to do without, especially for school!!
I have also seen my teachers use it for just about everything under the sun. They've made class newsletters, permission slips, directions, tests, quizzes, announcements, and so much more. I could confidently say that the majority of my teachers would have been lost without Word. It has the power to create charts, insert pictures, write words, and so much more. It can be so simple yet so complex at the same time!

Now onto a more daunting topic of conversation... copyright and fair use of materials. I am not going to lie, I was not too concerned with this topic when I in elementary school and probably even middle school. It did not become a big deal until I got to high school and learned the ramifications that can come from intentionally- or even unintentionally!!!- plagiarize someone else. Copyright specifically though played a huge role when I was a Junior and Senior in high school and was taking multimedia classes. I had to put together a lot of videos that needed background music and, man, it was hard to find songs and noises that wouldn't get copyrighted once I uploaded the assignment. It was difficult when I had a specific song in mind for a video and then realized that I couldn't even include it.
When it comes to dealing with all of this in the future as I begin to teach though, I want to make sure I am following every guideline possible because it is so easy to unintentionally use something that I am not allowed to. I do not think the situations will be as numerous as they are in my time as a student, but I have no doubt that they will be present and that will be where it may even be easier to not know and copyright something than when I have been hyperaware as aa student myself. I would also make sure my students are well educated on what they can and cannot incorporate and then why. I want them to be fully educated before they start than get flagged after the fact and have to learn then.

Now when it comes to the technology implementation issues, I want to start with academic honesty. That is something that we have all heard our entire careers as students. In order to fix this I would want to make all of my students sign a contract at the beginning of the year stating what this looks like and the consequences of not following it. I would then like to actually implement theses consequences as situations arise because I feel as if a lot of the issues we have are because teachers want to be nice and just have a discussion about this and not actually hold it to as high of a standard as they originally said they would. The second issue I want to address is privacy. I would fix this issue by allowing my students to use pseudonyms. I think there would be a lot of more growth within students if they had a way to feel more comfortable on assignments that allowed them to be more authentic. Fear of judgement gets in the way of fully expressing themselves so no effort is put into half of their assignments. The third issue would be cyberbullying. While I am positive that there is no solution to this, I would want to help the cause by calling my students out. If I see it happening, I want to publicly address it. I think when this topic is considered "private" then students get away with it more frequently because no one really knew that it happened and they think no one will ever know since it was so privately dealt with. People always hate being called out on their wrongdoings, so why would this be any different? Make them see how unpopular they become once they realize how uncool this actually is and the cyberbullying may actually decrease.

Thanks for "Chatting With Lucy"!! If you made it to the end, congrats!! I'll try and keep next week's post shorter, but I'm a talker if you couldn't tell!! Have a great week ladies and gents!!!