Plagiarism (7)

I though that the reading assigned by Kist was really interesting this week. I really enjoy this book; I think that it offers lots of good advice to us as teachers. This chapter especially focused on the safety of promoting the internet in the clasroom and making sure that our students are being "safe" when they travel around the internet during class on school computers. A lot of issues involving promoting the use of computers in the classroom revolved around the evolution of "cyber bullying" which has become a problem for many kids in high school. In my opinion, I don't agree that the use of computers in classroom is encouraging cyber bullying. It is giving students another outlet to use and find information. I don't know if this reading was directly insinuating that there is a connection between the two; however, this is just my opinion. In my high school, we were always encouraged to be creative and we were given the oppertunity to work online during class. I never heard of a cyber bullying problem because of this. In addition, I did go to a very large school that was technologically advanced and I think that because of this we had no motivation to cyber bully. The only think that I remember as "unsafe" on the high school computers was the ability for students to access a website called, chat roulette, which allowed students to see other students through the webcams on the computers.  At the end of the semester a group of kids were caught using this website and it was then blocked from the school computers. I think that it is going to take a while to figure out which websites are unsafe for students to use. I think that it will come with experience and we will learn as we go. However, I believe that overall computers are a benefit to the classroom and with time we will learn how to make them especially safe.