Using the internet in the classroom can be beneficial to students and teachers. As we know the internet can provide faster communication, information, and more knowledge then the average text book. The video this week has numerous of interesting facts that opened my eyes to many facts I didn’t realize. One of the most intriguing facts I found is the top jobs in 2004 don’t exist in 2010. Also, the jobs students in the classrooms are being prepared for are not created yet. When it comes to communication it brought up the average MySpace is viewed 30 times a day. From this we can learn teaching and communicating is moving all cyber. Which is okay, but as teachers we need to know how to monitor it with our students. Having a classroom full of kids who all have laptops, we have to find ways to get them from not going to visit MySpace during class or find ways for them to use MySpace as part of the assignments. Going into the field of English one main issue I will need to teach my students is about plagiarizing. By having the internet available and so many papers being available online, I will have to teach my students the consequences of copying someone else work and that is a form of stealing. As teachers we don’t want students to get lazy and rely on the internet for everything. They need to know how to interpret, paraphrase, and learn how to cite. Since the internet is so broad it makes plagiarizing easy, and this is a problem students get themselves in. It’s so easy to “Google” whatever you need.
Even though the internet has many challenges it has positives that can save lives. On the video clip, “Making a Connection Online” from previous lesson, it shows how one person story helped save many more. Many teens suffer from depression and may try to cause harm to them. Renee use to cut her arm, so the blog was named “To Write Love on Her Arms”. A friend started this for her. This blog is a place where young people can connect to talk to one another and give each other hope. Now the site has more than 200,000 members. By having this available it gives people like her strength to keeping living and be able to help others keep living. This saved her life as well as others. This is the cool feature about the internet. You can be all alone but with the click of a button you can connect to many people who are just like you and not feel alone
I do love the "shift happens" videos, and how eye-opening they can be to teachers and students. It's incredible to think how quickly technology is advancing and transforming, and that earlier education (elementary, middle, and secondary) needs to keep up with technological shift in order to produce capable world citizens.
ReplyDelete"To Write Love On Her Arms" was brought to my attention several years ago by a friend who had suffered deep depression in high school, and now actively participates in the community. I do think the ability to build helpful communities is one of the greatest assets the internet has to offer middle and high school students, so long as its approached carefully and monitored to keep out "unsavory" characters.