Cyberbully Reflection

Cyberbullying is using the internet (social network sites, chatrooms, email, etc.) and cell phones to deliberately harass someone. In addition, creating a false identification to manipulate someone is a form of harassment unique to cyberbullying.

The only time I can remember ever being involved with something similar to cyberbullying is in middle school. I participated in a terrible, yet completely typical drama among middle school girls. By the end of 8th grade my best friend and I had developed somewhat of a rivalry with another girl we had been friends with in the past. I don’t remember how it started, but my friend and I filled out an online survey about this girl with pretty rude comments. Next thing I knew we were in the counselor’s office discussing this email and have never been friends since.

Schools must always consider if their punishment for cyberbullying fits the “Tinker” standard. The Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District ruling states that schools cannot restrict student speech unless it is disruptive to school activities. On the other hand, there are laws that state that the school must act if they see a student being harassed on school property in order to create a safe school environment. Schools must find the balance between these standards while attempting to create a safe school environment where all children are able to learn without worrying about their safety.

Some of the court rulings were a little frustrating. Especially the one about the student creating a parody about the principle and the court ruled that it was unlawful for the school to suspend the student because it was created on the student’s personal computer at home. In my opinion, this was incredibly disruptive to the learning environment of the school and is considered a school issue.

I think that many times it will be obvious when a student is being cyberbullied. They may become quieter in class or less social; their grades may suffer as well. I also think that it is easy to sense tension between groups at school and this will be accentuated as a result of cyberbullying.

It is almost inevitable that cyberbullying will affect the classroom. Therefore, I feel the school should be able to regulate what goes on off school campus when it affects its students while they are on campus. The school can at least hold meetings with the students and a counselor, get their parents involved, and incorporate cyberbullying into their school policies. The school must bring this issue out in the open, discuss it, and make it clear that it will not be tolerated.

I think as a teacher I will try to create a general environment of respect for others and will not tolerate disrespect, harassment, or bullying in my classroom. I also hope to be a teacher that stands in the hallway between classes and deals with issues I see instead of ignoring them. I think it is a good idea to have an initial class discussion about respect in general and include cyberbullying in this discussion. This should be an issue that is continually revisited to remind students of the expectations. If specific issues come up I will speak with the students involved privately and may have a class discussion as well about the topic in general. I would definitely get the parents involved since they are most likely the owners of the computers these kids are using. If it seems to be a school problem I will advocate for school wide awareness raising. Maybe the school counselor can visit each class individually to discuss the issue of cyberbullying.

Copyright Reflection

Before this class I don’t think I ever really thought about copyright laws. The one thing that really surprised me was the discussion on showing movies or videos to a class. I never would have second guessed a teacher’s right to show an entire movie in class. The impression I got from our discussion and the readings is that a teacher can show a movie in class mostly because the nature of the use is educational.

I think that most of the copyright laws are fair. I guess it depends on who you are. If I created something I would definitely agree with the copyright laws and maybe want them to be stricter. However, as a student and a future student they seem a little ridiculous. I do think they are important because the creators do deserve credit for their work. There seems to be a good balance with the fair use laws in allowing people to build off of other works or ideas.

I will definitely pay attention to the amount of pages I copy or how many copies I distribute of a particular article to my students. Like Micaela suggested, I may even call the publisher and ask permission if I am not sure. Hopefully, I would not be the kind of teacher that uses the same things each year. I think I would get bored with that and the readings suggest avoiding using the same work for many years.

Just as I will inform my students about plagiarism, I will also teach them the basics of copyright and fair use laws. I think that if I, a Master’s student, had no idea about a lot of these laws then my middle school and high school students definitely won’t know. It is also a good way to teach them about respecting the property of others and valuing the time and effort put into each creation.

Twitter Seen as Tool for Social Change

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106963768

I thought this story was interesting and somewhat related to our class

My new kitties

Here are my two new cats. We adopted them last weekend. Marvel (like the comic book) is on the top and he is 3 months old. He is a lot smaller than he looks in the picture. Benjamin (bottom) and he is 5 months old. I love black cats! His eyes look weird in the picture because of the flash, but he has beautiful brown eyes!

Wikipedia Reflection

It usually depends on how much I know about my topic as to whether I will use Wikipedia or not. If I know absolutely nothing about it, I might start with Wikipedia and write down some important ideas, names, theories, etc. I will then go to google or search journal articles on the university’s website for those specific things. In high school I heavily used Wikipedia. Many of my teachers allowed us to use it as a source, but we had to have a number of other sources as well. I definitely relied on it too much for my research, but I learned quickly that that didn’t fly in college.

As a teacher, I don’t think I would allow my students to quote from Wikipedia. I would allow them to use it in a similar way that I do. We may go to the computer lab and structure our time. The first fifteen minutes could be spent writing, by hand, important ideas from the Wikipedia page concerning their topic. This would allow them to get a good start on their research and help them know what to look for in the first place. After that they would only be allowed to use what they wrote down in order to search on google or the school’s online collection of journal articles.

This article seemed to cover both sides fairly. I think it encourages the use of Wikipedia in the way it was meant to be used: as an encyclopedia. The article states that no encyclopedia is meant to “be used as a sole and final authoritative source” anyway (Johnson, p. 2). It also points out the Wikipedia has warnings on the pages that may contain bias or disputable facts. The article explains that one important difference between Wikipedia and a normal encyclopedia is that Wikipedia covers a much broader array of topics. This can be useful to students when they have a rare or very specific topic and do not know where to start their research.

Johnson also points out some key questions students should ask when evaluating the credibility of any website. Not only do we need to worry about Wikipedia, but the internet in general. I would definitely make sure my students learned how to do this before they begin any research project. I would also require that they use a minimum number of book resources. I think it is important for them to build this skill as well. Books provide in depth knowledge that most websites cannot and students need to know how to find this knowledge.

Teachers & Social Networking

I have a pretty common name, so I didn’t expect many results when I put my name in Google. When I first did a google search of my name I was shocked that my husband’s and my travel blog (http://dandkmexico.blogspot.com) was the second result. I told him about it and he kindly asked if I was signed into our gmail account at the time because that would probably make a difference. So I signed out and searched again and our blog came up as the 45th result. I then google searched my “handle” which is just my email address and the 8th result was my MySpace, which I have been meaning to delete for about a year. My Pipl search of both my name and handle came up with nothing, which was a little relieving.

There isn’t really anything scandalous about me on the internet. I wouldn’t really care if someone found our blog and read it. There may be some things I said that people would disagree with or I might be a little embarrassed about some venting I did on the blog, but there isn’t anything that could get me into trouble with my teaching job. I do want to delete my MySpace just because I don’t ever use it and it is really outdated.

The whole free speech issue is interesting and complex. Teachers have such a unique role in their communities. Most of the stories I read in the article seemed pretty unfair, but then again, when someone posts something online they should realize that it is no longer private. For example, the teacher in Maryland who complained about the parents on her MySpace has the right to free speech. On the other hand, if she chooses to be friends with her students instead of setting her page to private, she has then chosen to let her students into her private life and needs to be careful about what she posts online.

The story of the art teacher being fired because of nude pictures seemed completely unfair to me. Unlike the Maryland teacher, these pictures were not posted on her MySpace where she was friends with her students, but rather, this was professional artwork on her partner’s website. She is an art teacher and they hired her because of her artistic abilities. They should not then punish her for actually being an artist in her private life.

I am not an obsessive blogger and I occasionally use Facebook. It will not be hard for me to simply set my Facebook to private in order to protect myself and my job. I want to be the type of teacher that is a mentor to my students and go to their games, plays, etc. However, I think it is a bad idea to be “friends” with your students online. There needs to be a line somewhere and you are just asking for trouble if you don’t draw a line. I do like the idea of creating pages for clubs and events, but that does not require allowing students to look at your personal facebook page.

Using Blogs in the Classroom

Mr. Harbeck’s blog was great. I thought it was such a great use of a blog to connect with his students. I can see his students keeping his blog as one of their regularly visited sites just to check if there is anything new. They can look around at all the videos, pictures, and other posts whenever they want. How often would a student just go to their binder to look at all their math handouts? My guess is not very often. I loved how he put an encouragement on there to keep them motivated for the remainder of the year. I think that is such a great way to communicate a message like that. Students are much more accustomed to and willing to read short posts of someone’s thoughts accompanied by a picture than they are to listen to an adult lecture them about their lack of motivation. It is also a great way for students to help themselves by looking at the extra help he posted for the test and this may save class time.

Mr. Harbeck’s blog made me realize that teachers can use a blog for any subject. As a Spanish teacher I could have my students create a travel blog. They could choose a country and research the popular tourist attractions. They would then write, in Spanish, about their experiences in that country based on their research as if they were really traveling. They could post pictures and videos and if they wanted to get creative, could even photoshop themselves into pictures to make it even more realistic. Like Mr. Harbeck, I could post homework, practice exercises, vocabulary lists, extra help, study guides, and fun activities on the blog for constant student access. I could even post videos of native Spanish speakers paired with questions to check for comprehension. There seems to be endless possibilities.
I thought the “Don’t Feed the Trolls” article made good points. Just like any other new assignment, student online discourse needs clear guidelines. A lot of these suggestions sounded very familiar to what we have been taught to do in the classroom: role play rules, involve students in the creation of the guidelines, and model the rules for students. The only difference is that this is all being done online. I really liked the idea of students being able to give each other feedback. It is a form of immediate peer-review. Just as utilizing civil in-class discussions is important, so is online discourse essential for this generation of students.

Mark Prensky Articles

At first I felt I was somewhere in between digital native and immigrant. I think I may just be an immigrant that has lived in the “country” for a long time and is pretty well adjusted. I was in elementary school when we regularly went to the computer lab to practice typing and play the infamous Oregon Trail game. I remember getting AOL and chatting online for the first time when I was in 4th grade. I do pretty well with technology, but when something goes wrong I don’t have the depth of knowledge to be able to fix it.

I feel I have fallen behind in the last four years. I think the reason may be because I have been a poor college student for the last four years and haven’t been able to buy the newest laptop or cell phone. I think my digital immigrant tendencies are more dominating because my first reaction to new technologies is usually negative. It took a long time for me to start texting because I thought the whole idea was silly; “why can’t I just call them?” For some reason, I think I am always resistant to new “fads” in general and, nowadays, most are technology related.
In high school, technology in the classroom was limited. Every classroom had an overhead projector and most teachers had a computer in their room, but that was about it. In college it depended on what classroom I was in. There were old parts of the campus and the modern buildings. Some rooms were referred to as “smart rooms”. These rooms had a “doc-viewer” and were able to project documents from a thumb drive. It definitely made presentations easier, but sometimes that meant sitting through a lot of boring power point presentations.

There were a lot of things that bothered me about this article, but it also taught me some things and opened my mind to using technology in the classroom. It does make sense to use a medium to teach that students already use every day and Prensky is right when he says that we are not engaging students. The articles inspired me to think of ways I could use technology to teach Spanish. I would love to do some kind of internet “penpal” with students in a Spanish speaking country. I am sure something like that already exists on the web, but if not, there is always Skype. I also use an online dictionary (it is a website posted on my blog) that is incredibly useful. On this website you can post questions about difficult translations or phrases and professional interpreters answer your questions. However, I have to do my best to ensure that my students never use an internet site to completely translate a paper, paragraph, or even a sentence for them. That is no way to learn Spanish.

There were also things Prensky said that I strongly disagree with. I think my agitation is escalated by the fact that he is the CEO of a game-based learning company and is obviously motivated by sales for his company. His whole basis is that kids’ brains are “developed through game and Web-surfing processes on the computer” and we should therefore adjust the way in which we teach these students (Part II, p. 3). Hold on a second; is the fact that our kids are growing up on TV and video games something that we are supposed to just accept and adjust to? That makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I think a lot of neurologists and social psychologists would argue that the brain needs more than these stimulants to develop the critical thinking and social skills essential to a successful life.

Then Prensky really offended me in “Engage Me or Engrage Me”. He compares the engagement students receive from “musicians, movie makers, their TV stars, [and] their game designers” to students back in the 60’s who “never even knew what real engagement feels like” (Engage Me or Enrage Me, p. 1). I think students in the 60’s felt quite engaged when they went on a hike, climbed to the top of a mountain, fought for something they believed in, or played their favorite sport. You will never convince me that watching Paris Hilton completely demean herself as well as every other female or a ten year old boy sitting in his room playing video games by himself for 8 hours on Saturday is “real” engagement while those other things from the “past” are not.
Mark Prensky lost almost all legitimacy with me through comments like these. Nevertheless, I will not throw the baby out with the bath water; I still think that incorporating technology in the classroom is very important in reaching students today. Whether I like it or not, the fact is that students are spending “over 20,000 hours watching TV…and 5,000 hours of book reading” before they graduate from college (Part II, p. 1).

My Favorite Animal

My favorite animal is a cat. That sounds lame, but i love cats and I'm going to get a kitten (maybe 2) very soon! I will have a picture of my new cat when I get it, but for now I only have a picture of the cat I want.

My First Blog!

Hi! My name is Katie and this is my blog. I am in the MAT program at Concordia and I am going to teach High School Spanish! Yeay!