Keeping Students Safe Online

I was very intrigued by this article- and one of the first things that caught my attention was the section that talked about how instilling fear does not work as a way to keep our students safe. I have to say that I agree with this 100%. Often times trying to "scare" someone into not doing something makes them even more curious about it. I feel like this is why we need to teach students to be safe and to know how to look through a lens where they can separate what is good and what is not. How do we do this? By giving students the proper skills, not by punishing or scaring our students.
The statistics about cybersafety and cybersecurity curriculum really bothered me. Teachers not teaching about this in the last 12 months? Thats an entire year! As educators it is our responsibility to teach our students the content that they need to know and to keep them safe. I find it appalling that teachers are not teaching their students about how to be safe online when students are using the internet everyday-often times for school assignments. I know when I was in school I was never told about safety online...I learned about safety online from my parents. I think it is a shame that this is not something that is being incorporated into the curriculum in our schools more. This needs to be something that starts being taught at a young age, because students as young as preschool are using computers for different tasks.

I think another huge issue is cyber bullying. I have seen this being talked about in some schools when they do units on bullying but I think it is not talked about enough as it directly relates to safety online. I think the worst part of cyber bullying is the anonymity of it...students need to know that bullying online is never ok and if they are being bullied online they need to know what to do about it. This is something that is very serious and can be detrimental to many students-even pushing some to suicide. As teachers we can give our students the information about how to deal with things like this if they ever happen, and we can teach students how to get out of a situation like this. I do like the idea of teaching students to cooperate with each other and how to defend someone who is being bullied. I think that this is something that can help the students with understanding bullies better and when they are at school we can be there to watch our students. When they get home and go online though we are not there to watch and make sure that everyone is behaving- this is why teaching students safety online is so crucial...for their safety and for the safety of others.

Transliteracy

I found this article very interesting and I definitely enjoyed reading it. I think that transliteracy is an extremely important and necessary skill for everyone to have. I think that not having this skill is something that could definitely inhibit one's learning. The following quote really caught my attention: "Doug Ackerman suggests that teachers may be "less literate than their students" as students are able to adapt more readily to new transliteracy models"(pg. 44). This is an important realization for all teachers and future teachers to have-that right now there are students who are more literate than their teachers. When I become a teacher this fact will be even more true. Knowing this definitely inspires me to become transliterate, and to be able to take in information from all areas. This also inspires me to get to know about all of the different medias that are out there- because ink and paper is not the main form of communication anymore. Knowing all of these different medias will be beneficial as a teacher because I can use these forms to communicate with my students in a way that interests them and because as the teacher I will be as literate as my students are.

I also think that because students are becoming transliterate and learning communication through all of these different medias, teaching safety is an important idea. I think that as a teacher it will be my job to learn about all of these medias and to then teach students how to properly use them. The article talks about teaching students how to analyze for accuracy and credibility on an electronic platform. This is something that I think is of high importance because students are always using technology whether in school or at home, and they need to learn early on how to use technology in a beneficial and safe way. 

I Can't Think!

Wow I definitely feel a bit overwhelmed after reading all of the information presented in that blog. It was all good information-just a lot to take in. One of the sections of the article that I found particularly interesting is the section that talks about how "recency trumps quality". So basically our brains are wired to notice a change which means that whatever has changed more recently is what will stick in our brain. In today's society where we are constantly getting texts, tweets, facebook posts, etc this is particularly interesting to me. You could get up to 30 facebook messages in an hour but the one that sticks with you the most will be the post that you last saw, not necessarily what was most important.

This gets me thinking about how we can decide which information is important and which information is not important. If we are constantly being bombarded with all of this information (good and bad) and our brain is wired to remember the information that we last saw/heard, then it will take a conscious effort to decipher between good and bad and true and false. Wow that thought alone is overwhelming to me!

The last paragraph asks the question that I am left with right now...How can you protect yourself from having your decisions warped by excess information? I like the idea of taking things in in batches and prioritizing the things that you read and take in. This way you are getting less information at once so you will be able to process and remember more information. I definitely think it is true that some people are better and ignoring "extra" or unnecessary information-but I am going to have to take the path prioritizing and taking things in batches because that is not me. I feel completely overwhelmed by all of the emails in my inbox, and all of the constant information that is coming to me. I think this article did help to address this issue though and give a few tips to help those who feel the same way (even if it means turning your phone off).