Blog Entry Numero Uno.

Hello reader,

My week so far has been really boring and uneventful. I guess the fire drill and pictures today were the most exciting things of the whole week. I always hate taking pictures because the photographers which are always D.L.O.L.s (dear little old ladies) are always like, “you look so gorgeous!” Then you actually get the pictures and one eye is shut, your hair is sticking up in the back, and your eyeliner is up to the brow bone. Oh yeah, ma’am, I look model ready. 

"Rage Quit." 05/Sept/13. http://files.sharenator.com/funny_gifs_nerd_rage-s500x281-311786.gif

The fire drill was actually really boring, reflecting on it. We quite literally walked out of the building and walked back in. I did learn some pretty useful stuff in the last two weeks that relate to our digital literacy, though. 

In the past two weeks we learned some words that when asked the meaning of them nobody actually knows. These are also related to our digital literacy for this week. A few of these words are: fair use, public domain, and copyright.

Fair use is the ability to use a small amount of someone’s creative work without their permission, but only in certain ways. A common example of fair use is quoting copyrighted works of literature to illustrate an argument of point. 

Generally when making presentations that will be published, you need things under fair use. If you decide to be all "hey, I'm too cool to use stuff under fair use and I'm going to  use copyrighted images on my blog saying they're mine" you can potentially get into a lot of trouble. It really isn't worth it to me. Just use things under creative commons, or fair use. The things under fair use actually tend to be of a better quality, anyways.  

Public domain is creative works that are not protected by copyright and are therefore free for one to use however they want. A common example of software in the public domain is the world wide web, (your first web browser). 

Copyright is a law that protects a creator’s ownership of and control over the content he or she creates, requiring other people to get the creator’s permission, before they can copy, share, or perform that work. This is something that you really need to pay attention to, especially if you have an article, or presentation that will be posted online. You can get in serious trouble for that stuff. 

I also learned about some pretty interesting Web 2.0 tools this week. One of them is Schoology. Schoology is a really neat learning tool that allows teachers to really interact with their students online. You can turn in assignments, check your course grade for the semester, and check for upcoming assignments.

A positive aspect of Schoology is the fact that you don’t have a lot of papers flying around in the bottom of your book bag. The only really negative thing about Schoology is the fact that sometimes it gets confusing with due dates. Some teachers will change the due dates, but not on Schoology which really makes me worry.

Another cool Web 2.0 tool we learned about is Quizlet. Quizlet allows the user to play games and review vocabulary terms while actually having a miniscule amount of fun. The only negative thing about Quizlet is the fact that sometimes it can be super laggy. Then again, it may just be the school servers being bottlenecked. 

We all know you're going to sing this picture in your head. 
Have fun with that song, guys.. and girls if you're sensitive about that sort of thing. (-:

"Myspace Page." 26/Aug/2013. http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqf4e5Cm3Y1qgdbito1_500.gif