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.
I really liked your post this week about Cyber Bullying and how it is something that cannot be ignored. It is so important to teach our students to respect one another and not hurt each other through bullying but also how to deal with bullying if it does ever happen. It is a hard task to try and teach internet safety and make it interesting and meaningful. I guess we can all use methods like the one you talked about from your past as non-examples when we try and prepare our own lessons on the topic.
ReplyDeleteGood response, I enjoyed reading your point about how students need to learn internet etiquette. If students learned how to talk and act on the web it would decrease cyber bullying immensely. i also liked you point about how students should be discrete about there identities online and until they can judge whether to share information about themselves.
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