EDU 615 Technology Applications for School Districts

I think that many people in the educational setting do not understand the importance of following copyright laws.  When asked the question if my school had a copyright policy, I honestly did not know the answer to that question.  When looking through the policy book, since none of our policies are actually digitized, I did find a copyright policy.  This surprised me, but in a good way since it seems like so many of our school policies are way outdated or do not exist.  The policy itself definitely could use an upgrade to discuss technology, but it is better than nothing.  One thing the policy does state is to make sure it talks about the "fair use" under federal law or else we need to get permission form the copyright owner before reproducing materials.  One thing that could be added that I liked when looking through the different websites was the thought of intellectual property.  I never understood what that meant until I watched the movie on Mark Zu...

When looking at the different websites on cyberbullying, I realized that there is a lot of information out there that needs to be shared with families, students, and staff.  The website that I thought was the most useful was the internet safety 101 website.  Things that I really liked about this website were the safety tips along with the parents guides.  These are really useful things. To answer the question how could I use some of these resources in my school would be just to require the staff and students to do some research on this topic just like I am doing for this course.  One thing that I liked about the FBI website was the computer games for the grades to play while learning the cyberbullying.  Another thing we could do is bring in an expert to have an assembly on cyberbullying.  We did that once and had good parent turnout. A way to teach students and staff about cyberbullying would be to have them look through these websites and information and m...

The rigor and relevance framework seems like a framework that schools should try to adhere too.  For a very long time, we have been trying to follow Bloom's Taxonomy, but unfortunately that is not the only thing that is important.  I have many conversations with my technology coordinator, who also spends some of her time focusing on technology integration into the curriculum, and we always talk about how education has not kept up with technology.  The vast majority of the teachers are not properly trained in technology applications and it shows in their lessons.  I think one of the most interesting things that I read in the one document is the statement about how education has not kept up with technology. When looking at how I can use the framework and implement it into our school, I realize that the staff I have in my building needs a lot of professional development in order to be prepared to implement the technology that they should into their curriculum.  In ...

When looking for school policies on technology, it was very obvious that we are lacking in that department.  I searched through my school policies that we have in a binder and did not find anything on the topics you mentioned in your questions.  Many superintendents might be surprised by something like this, but this does not surprise me.  When looking throughout the book of policies, most policies were put into place in 2005 and have not been updated since then.  That was one thing I told the school board that I wanted to work on in the upcoming years, but until COVID is not a major issue, the vast majority of the policies will not get updated. Even though we do not have school technology policies in place, we do have some verbiage in our handbook for school devices.  Although it is not a school policy, the handbook talks about acceptable use and how to behave on social media.  We need to take some of that verbiage and put it into some policies for our sch...