Week 14 Sexting

It is very sad to what happened to all those kids who tragically ended their lives because of cyber bullying. These are very fragile situations that require a lot of attention by a team of specialists. I strongly believe that not only parents must be involved in these situations, but also the school psychologist, a professional investigator, a school representative and also teachers. It is very hard to restrict technology because of many reasons; for example in case of an attack children need to contact their parents.. but on the other side the use of cell phones in schools is vey distractive and unnecessary. There should definitely be a restriction on the use of cell phones. Schools must make students aware of the consequences of sexting or other wrong actions they might take. The tragic death of those two girls who committed suicide must be told to students so they could understand where sexting can lead into. I do not believe that completely banning cell phones in schools would bring any benefits because students can send messages to each other after school and then talk in school about it, but some things schools can do are: 1) Make students aware of the risks of sexting and their consequences 2) make students aware of the punishments 3) Monitor the "victim" very closely 4) Demand phone companies more restrictions based on age 5) Increase the control on cell phones inside the school. Even though it might be hard to control, technology can be taken over if a lot of attention is paid. Perhaps there is a way to disable photo texting without parent's permission based on the children's age. Or expel from the school those who bully. One thing that must be and can be done for sure is to get parents, school members , psychologists and investigator work together. Every life is worth protecting it.

Fair Use

In order to define "fair use," we must look at the laws first because everything is depended on the laws. Basically the video posted by professor Bigsby that we watched is an example of fair use. It is such because since the beginning the purposes of its usage are clearly stated: criticism, parody and news. The material is modified by Eric Faden. The fact that Eric Faden states his purposes and recognizes the rights of the author,then the material becomes a "fair use." Education needs to use a lot of materials which are produced by different creators, so in order to use them accordingly, I believe that the rights of the author must be always recognized. Teachers must always reveal their purposes clearly and make sure that the material has permission to be shown publicly. There are instances when teachers may need to request purchases of various educational materials becuase that is the only legal way to use those materials.There are a lot of useful materials which can be also found on different public domains and those materials could be used as well for educational purposes. In those cases, teachers must do so. We all know that there exist a lot of "pirate websites" out there and often teacher purposefully or unpurposefully fall for them, but unfortunately that is still a violation of the copyright. Once I had a teacher who was using a software called Lime Wire and downloading music so he could show it to us in class. That was clearly an illegal action which totally violated the laws and was not a fair use.There is still more left to be done about strengthening the protection of the rights of the author.