Issues in Educational Technology

Ethics It is easy to say that teachers and schools promote good ethics in the classroom at all times.

However, in reading a couple of this week’s articles and links, I discovered that this is not always the case. For example, in “The Educator’s Guide to Copyright and Fair Use,” the way that teachers often use charts, songs, graphs, and maps is discussed. Many teachers (myself included) often show things or play things for their students without saying where the information originally came from or who owns the copyright on it. I know that I am often guilty of this in my history class. I sometimes question whether or not I should tell my students where I got some of the information I present to them, and I now have come to realize that I should!

(I do let them know when I use a presentation or a story written by someone else. I just never thought of it for everything I show!) Another, trickier, example was shown to me in “10 Big Myths about copyright explained.” I often encourage my students to “copy” an author’s style or tone when writing their own stories. At first, for students who need more guidance, this means copying the characters and even the dialogue. I never really thought about this as a violation of copyright, but in a way it is. Granted, my students don’t publish their work.

However, I need to make sure that I am informing them about what the law is and how it is appropriate to use stories as models when learning but not when submitting a published copy!

The scary thing is that copyright is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ethics in the classroom Today’s students struggle to learn ethics. While it is easy to blame parents for part of the problem (OUR parents never condoned cheating!!!! In fact, we would have been in serious trouble if we copied something and passed it off as our own!!! This is what you hear from a lot of teachers, no matter their age!), students do spend roughly 7-8 hours in school every day.

Schools and teachers need to start to teach ethics at an early age and continue teaching ethics all the way through college. Most high school students understand that copying another’s work off of the Internet or paying one of those companies to write an essay is not “right.” So, why do they do it anyway? I think they do because the consequence of such actions is not always completely negative or serious enough. For example, if a kid gets away with it, they sometimes get a positive consequence from their friends. (Wow! You got away with that? You’re so awesome!!) They might even get paid by others who are desperate to get an essay done in five minutes! Even if a student gets “caught” by the teacher, the punishment is sometimes not enough to deter them from this behavior. Many teachers give a zero and perhaps a detention, but the students are usually required to redo the assignment and can still earn points for it. For students who don’t care about these consequences, do they really matter? In addition, while it is easy for teachers to tell kids that cheating in the “real world” doesn’t cut it, students don’t