Weekly Reflection #10

In this week's session we once again explored another web tool that we can add to our PLE and also the importance of understanding and following copyright law. In my previous blog post, I included an example of the work we did this week in the form of my Animoto presentation on copyright law. The most notable quality of Animoto as an online tool for presentations is the ease of use for this program. The short video that I posted only required selecting a theme, choosing a piece of music from the large selection available on the site and adding few pictures or videos. This will obviously be a useful tool in future educational activities as it is easy to use and gives a different presentation style than the conventional PowerPoint slideshow.

Lawler, R. (CC), 2014. Retrieved from: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/animoto-enterprise/

The creative tools that we explored this week are all unique in terms of the type of presentation styles, specifically Animoto because I did the majority of work this week on this program. For a professional presentation, the conventional PowerPoint presentation might be the program to use, but for unique and creative designs with better audio and visual appeal, Animoto seems like one of the easiest web tools to use.

Animoto would be included on my PLE diagram primarily under the "create" section as it is a web tool that allows customization of a creative presentation. It could also be included in the "convenience" section due to the fact that it easier to put together a presentation with a lot of different mediums such as images, videos and text together with accompanying audio in a timely manner.

In this week's session, we learned more about becoming an effective digital citizen when we were presented the material on copyright laws. One of the key points expressed in the lecture material was that Google Images has different options for finding images that have a range of possible uses. In my previous post I stated that all of the pictures in my Animoto presentation were copyright free and available for use, sharing and modifying. Understanding the different restrictions for use of images is important to maintaining the integrity of any work a digital citizen produces. Gaining a better understanding of the different restrictions and how to find images and videos suitable for use is a critical step to ensure that you are following all of the digital responsibilities for creating a strong online community.

In my Feedly this week I found an article from the New York Times discussing a company called Aereo that filed for bankruptcy. It was ruled that they violated copyright laws in their business procedures. The full article is here for anyone interested in reading more about this interesting story.