Blog Post #3

I think that, because I had so much fun using Inspiration, I would like to use that sometime in a class. I did my homework assignment on poetry and made a web that went line by line and for each line named at least one poetic technique and then explained why that technique was influential to the text. It made dissecting a poem really easy. I would like to be able to let the middle schooler’s who I’m teaching use this program to do a similar thing.

For my website I chose the website of the Art Institute of Chicago: http://www.artic.edu/aic/ This website has a balance of words and graphics. It is easy to figure out where to find information because the links are labeled not only with words but also with pictures. It uses only three types of fonts and two different colors (greys and red). The words use both upper and lower case letters appropriately, the text lines are short, it is single spaced, and the audience could easily be a person of any age, since that is who goes to that museum.

I think that my experience with copyright laws in school is similar to my usage of MS Word: it has much to do with writing papers. I think that parenthetical documentation and footnotes are such much a part of me now that I actually site things in regular conversation. Which may just be because I’m a nerd; I think it has more to do with having to write at least one paper a week for the last nine years of my life. But the fear of being caught claiming that someone else’s work is mine, even accidentally, overwhelms me, and seems to me like a lazy way to get kicked out of school. I think that, since I’m going to be teaching English, one of the things that I would like to do, is something I was taught to do: writing all of my quotations/paraphrasing on note cards, a different color or shape note card for each source. I was introduced to this in 6^th grade, and it made research a lot more fun, and then all the information was laid out for me so it was very difficult to forget, and because the project was fun, most students wanted to do it. I think that I would like to do a similar thing with my students because I know it’s something that I do even now. I also think that turnitin.com is a fantastic website and I think that most students understand that they can’t get away with plagiarism when a teacher is using a source that scans the entire Internet.