Keeping Kids Safe Online

I agree with this article that instilling fear into students about the internet is ineffective. When I was in middle and high school, my school tried to keep us safe online by making us afraid of strangers on the internet. As a result, I usually zoned out presentations about internet safety and my classmates and I treated internet safety as a joke. The article points out that while strangers on the internet are a concern, a bigger concern is peers online.

I believe that cyberbullying is an important issue that, while it is gaining attention in the media lately, needs more focus in our schools. In-person bullying is a difficult enough situation for students to deal with, but when you add the anonymity of the internet it becomes a much more confusing issue. Words on the internet can be just as damaging as physical bullying, but it is often not treated as a serious issue in schools. As the article suggests, students should be taught how to respond to cyber bullying and internet etiquette in general. I also believe that it is important to teach students how to keep their identities anonymous online when they are young, because that is not an intuitive skill that people have, and when students are young, they may not be able to judge when it is appropriate and safe to share information about themselves.

Transliteracy

Transliteracy is a term that I had never heard before reading this article. Although it was a new concept to me, I identified with a few topics brought up in the article. Some of the slogans in the article were a little cheesy, but they seem like they would be useful to students (and to me!).

"We need to read not to speed" struck a chord with me because I am currently trying to find articles to use in a research project. The article says that students spend only two seconds evaluating whether or not an article or website is worth their time, and I think that I do that on a regular basis. There may information I am missing out on because I am speeding through resources and trying to find the best ones. This reminded me a lot of last week's article. There are so many resources out there, and I am always trying to find the best ones without getting overwhelmed, so I just speed right through them.

The point the article made about ensuring that online sources are credible also made me think. Now that I am in college and regularly writing papers, I know what websites I can go to in order to find scholarly, reputable articles and journals, but many students are not aware of these resources. There's so much information online and so many varying websites that it's difficult to know what you can trust. It will be important for me to teach my future students about finding reputable information so they are prepared to write papers and find out the facts about the world.

Personally, I hope that the increase of digital information does not cause printed work to fade away, but online information is becoming more and more prominent, so whether I want to or not I need to become very technologically literate and transliterate so I can help my students navigate all the differing types of information that will be available to them.

"I Can't Think!" by Sharon Begley

This article explores the information overload that members of our society often feel. It has been shown that when a person is trying to process too much information at once, parts of their brain "shut off" and our ability to make smart, creative decisions is hindered. This phenomenon is especially perpetuated by advancing technology. The internet provides immediate access to more information than we could ever use and laptops and smartphones mean that we can essentially carry this information with us! Over analyzing situations (i.e. collecting too much data) can even make people less satisfied with a choice even if it is well informed, because people will begin to think about what could have happened if they chose something different.

I can definitely identify with information overload. Sometimes when I come home after a long day of classes and try to do my homework I'll find (usually the next day if/when I check my work) that things I'm wrote down were poorly written or didn't make a whole lot of sense. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to give your mind a break after a long day, but when you have a lot on your plate that can be a difficult task. However, as Begley pointed out, some of our most creative ideas can occur when we do take a break from our information-heavy lives.

It is a struggle to manage time and the amount of information you are trying to process without getting overwhelmed. This is something I will have to keep in mind as a teacher. The last thing I want is for my students to simply shut down during class or while attempting to do homework at home! As the article said, the brain is not very good at simply ignoring unimportant information. Because of that I will attempt to make my lessons as clear as possible while I teach and I will try to build time into my school day during which my students can hopefully have a break from the intense amount of information they usually have to deal with