M-Word, Copyright, and Social Media... OH MY!

Through out my many years of school I have used Microsoft Word many times. In elementary school I remember the whole class excitedly lining up and walking to the library and having the librarian teach us about using word. In middle school we used it again to do little reports and in class essays. Often if I was supposed to make a power point at home or right something down, I would use a different application called Open Office because I could not afford the absurd price of the software. This continued on until I was in eleventh grade when I began duel enrollment and was granted access to Microsoft office 2016. Having not used the real in many years, every time I had to make a power point or do something creative with the program I would go all out and be as creative as I could, weaving pictures and GIf''s into all my slides and design them with all kinds of colors and overtime it became one of my absolute favorite things to do. Most of my teachers in in high school and college also used power point for everything from morning questions to lectures and everything in between. Because of this, I never really saw them using Word unless they were making an assignment or test for us. Even then, they could have been using Word Pad or even Open office and I probably wouldn't know the difference.

I will be the first to admit my frugality. In the days of my youth, I would pirate everything from movies to music to games and other digital treats. As a student, many of my teachers would pull up clips of movies on YouTube to emphasize a point or liven up a lesson. Some teachers that I had were very unprepared and in the morning I would watch them frantically searching the web for a power point that someone else had made about the topic they were going to cover while I watched in horror. (I normally sat close to the teachers desk because it helped me focus.) Then they would stumble over this power point that they had just pirated while the students struggled to read the watermarked slides. I would often think to myself why they wouldn't just make their own slide shows so they could present better and not be so flustered during class. (Then a few weeks later I'd be reading an essay that I had written at 2 in the morning in a sleep deprived haze whilst my teacher was checkering other papers that were turned in for plagiarism.) As a teacher, and a student it is so easy to give into the temptation of procrastination and plagiarism. However, these can result in legal consequences which is why it is important to present information in your own words and in your own works.  I know many people who got in trouble for plagiarism, normally they would get suspended for two weeks and a zero on the assignment. They would always get tagged because the school used a special software that would read the document and match it to its own database and anything that matched on the web. I do not see plagarism as a problem because of these systems, but I would want to discourage it by splitting the projects into multiple assignments so that they would have to plagiarize multiple times, or reverse engineer the plagiarized assignment. Copyright laws don't bother me either because of how much I enjoy creating power points and tests and quizzes, plus after the first time I wont have to re-make the power points until the curriculum changes or I get tired of them, and I will only have to change a few words on assignments and tests every time.

Now, I want to discuss cyber bullying. Unlike copyright and academic honesty there is much less I can do to prevent this. I can not forbid high-schoolers from going on social media. Often times cyber bullying is complex and students will not want to show authoritative figures what people are saying or doing to them online because of how it may make them look. The best thing I advise to my friends as of now is abstinence from social media. There is something to be said about how emotionally and mentally draining these platforms can be. They are addicting and promote an unhealthy culture of self value through the validation of strangers, mutuals, and acquaintances. These can be avoided by setting your account to private and only letting close friends and family see your account of course, but then you're friend might let theirs see a post of yours and so on, until the one person or group that you did not want seeing your posts sees them. The best thing I can do is promise the students that I will listen, JUDGMENT FREE, to their problems and try my absolute hardest to do everything I can to make them comfortable again.  All three of these problems plague our schools, but we have to try our hardest to counter them.

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