What matters?

This week in ICT class, we looked a designing a web page, something I will be doing next week, so I will have that to show later on. I am really looking forward to it actually since I took a web design class in high school that was a lot of fun. Teachers use websites for their classes to keep everyone, parents and students up-to-date on what is happening in class, and what new ideas they have for their class. More will follow on the website as I get working on it.
On the what matters front though, we had speakers in class on Wednesday and they taught us how to find images that we are actually allowed to use, without violating copyright laws, like my photo above. The website we used for this is compfight.com, which allows us to search flikr for creative commons images. This is some very important information for teachers, since we want our students to be following the law, which includes copyright laws, that in many cases protect online pictures. The picture search was a ton of fun, since it also allows you access to all the creative minds in the world that have decided to share pictures online. My advice, if you haven't tried it, pick a random word and type it into the search engine, you will be amazed at what comes up, and you can use it without fear of copyright laws! Take my picture, it looks really cool, and it is just someone manipulating feather,s such ordinary things, to become extraordinary. Once we picked a picture, we were able to edit it online, which was fun and easy to do. Not only that it was free on the website pixlr.com, something that is always good for schools.
Creativity matters. We were asked by the presenters to fill in this question, Why blank matters?, and clearly I picked creativity. I believe that teachers need to very creative in their classroom, whether that means having ten different ways to explain a math problem, or having different projects available to their students, like a photo essay using photos found online or that the students take, and then edited with a photo editing program or website. Technology offers so many different avenues for students to be creative, like a students who dreads making a presentation to the class can make a video of it and play that or have an automatically running powerpoint with audio recording of them running. Students could also create a website for a novel, or other piece of literature, sort of like a band website, something that introduces the characters and covers all of the information of the novel. They could also create facebook pages or online dating profiles (Romeo and Juliet)  for characters. They could write a blog from the point of a famous explorer, looking at their daily or weekly discoveries.
All of these ideas allow for a lot of teachable moments too, since you have to look at how to use the technology, as well as all of the background information needed for the project. Not only that, but it can lead to discussions of copyright laws, and students could debate both sides of this issue. Students also need to be taught about responsibility when it comes to technology, as far to often it is just seen as a fun toy that doesn't need rules or restrictions. All of these are issues that teachers should address, even if they are not always in a curriculum, as they are pieces of real world information students should have.
To conclude, technology can allow students freedom and creativity in the classroom, and so I guess what matters, is making use of all the resources available to further creativity.