Newsletter blog

Copyright is a form of patenting where the person has the right to the content they have created. The author has exclusive rights to the work that lasts 70 after their death. The work that can be copyrighted includes novels, articles, songs, movies, pictures, sculptures, sound recordings, software, and much more. By copyrighting an item the creator protects it from theft, however, there is another related term "fair use', which allows others to use the copyrighted material. Fair use allows someone to use pieces of copyright material without the permission of the original owner, so long as they follow certain rules.

 When writing reviews or related articles you can include small pieces of a copyrighted piece but you must include references giving credit to the original author and copyrighted piece. 

When teaching a class with a subject that is highly copywriting such as Disney it is usually much better to give them credit at the end of the snippet or end of the lesson. When writing reviews,  the college student should place references in the paper. Detecting copyright material can be done by software applications, the same tools can detect plagiarism by students but is not always as easy to detect. 

The two issues I would be concerned most about are Academic dishonesty and Student privacy. These two are linked and when dealing with one you must be careful not to destroy the other. 

Academic dishonesty is difficult to prove and to avoid, It is usually easy to see when a student understands something and if that student gets good grades, it makes sense. It is more difficult to see the student who is not grasping the point or subject. A quiet student may understand everything or nothing at all. calling out a student in the open class for answers my help identify issues, and closely monitoring homework for identical answers or very similar ones may alert you to possible dishonesty. Questioning students on their answers must be done one on one in private rooms to ensure privacy is maintained, and not in an 'open-classroom'.

Randomly sitting students during a test or exam may help any possible concerns of 'copying' and randomizing the test questions for each student may also assist. 

Any group decisions in class must be carefully monitored to ensure every student is engaged, understands the principle, and adds to the group. Any student who seems to be struggling must be taken to one side for a private discussion of theirs and your concerns. 

I have made Newsletters in the past when I was in High School for extracurricular activities so I was not too unfamiliar with the process. I have also used tools such as Mailchimp that handle the layout but are not free. I chose to use Word and try to make use of the various techniques of columns, embedding and hyperlinks it has to offer. In the future if I was going to write many newsletters I probably would find a tool and a nice template to use on a recurring basis. Using Word to format the newsletter was cumbersome and would take a lot of time on a regular basis.