The article made it clear that bullying and harassment are the most common risk students face when using technology. It makes complete sense that this is most commonly occurring between peers and not strangers. It is foolish to ignore the risk of sexual predators, illegal content, and identity frauds, but educating students on how to protect themselves from these phenomena is much easier. One of the biggest keys that I pulled from the article was acknowledging that students who are at the most risk online are also at the most risk offline.
I found many great ideals in the Netiquette section and several specific strategies towards teaching students how to refrain from risky online behaviors. There were also many ideals that I had a hard time visualizing a course of action for. Offline bullying, harassment, and character fraud is an epidemic that's hard enough to prevent. I'm afraid tackling these issues online are going to be way harder to objectify. Even with those great ten tips, we as teachers are in for a challenging battle that shouldn't be idealized or generalized. We are taught in Woodring not to use broad statements like "help students to understand _____". With something as powerful as the internet, I think our standards should be raised not lowered.
Overall, this article was very useful. I think its an awesome tool for raising awareness and preventing the potential dangers our students face on a daily basis. I loved the application of: turning away from scare tactics, focusing on reinforcement, teaching skills to sort information, and using appropriate social interactions.
I think you have some really awesome points here! I think that you are right about highering our standards when it comes to the internet. Unfortunately, I think teachers get intimidated because many times students know more about the internet than they do, so they lower their standards and simply give a brief overview. Teachers need to also be educated so inturn, they can bring high standards not only to their lessons, but also to their expectations of the students application of the lesson.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that this could be a big task as a teacher, but that it has to be done. I know that incredible amounts of time and resources have been put into anti-bullying programs, and I'm wondering if the same amount of time and attention will be given to online safety. As a parent, I only see a brief mention here and there about it from the schools. We have a long way to go in educating kids about these issues.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it looks like a daunting task for teachers, when we are also trying to teach other subjects. Like you said, internet safety is important because students have access to it now, and they have access to it in many different places. I agree that raising our standards for the students, and holding them to high levels of appropriate internet behavior is completely within our ability as teachers.
ReplyDeleteI think that the connection between online and offline behavior is really important. I agree that the point that children who are at risk offline are also at risk online is key. I do also agree that as teachers regulating online behavior is more difficult than in the classroom. It is a challenging problem and I think the sooner we begin to deal with it, the better we can get at it. We do need high standards and we need to keep raising them as we learn to do it better.
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