Cyber Bullying and Filters- Can't we just filter the cyber bullies?

In our school we have had some serious issues with cyber bullying. It is something that is so tough to control because it sometimes happens outside of school but it has huge effects inside of school. Last year we had a big problem with a specific group of girls that was involved with cyber bullying and ended up causing a fight inside the school building. I think there need to be specific punishments laid out in the event of online bullying. The case we had at school ended up with the students being suspended and really effecting the atmosphere of the school for awhile. It creates a tension and I think bullying someone online is just as bad as doing it in person.

On a separate topic I think the filters in school can be both a blessing and a curse. The problem with a filter is twofold. First, the students can find ways to get around them. In our school they download firefox (we use internet explorer) and can go around the filters which are set up for internet explorer. Another problem is that they block certain things that I would like the students to be able to look up. I did a project recently where the students had to look up current events relating to Lord of the Flies and they weren’t able to look up ANY pictures (google images is blocked) and they were blocked from many sites that would have been helpful (i.e. sites about Nazis) On the other side, the filters do keep out other things that are obviously inappropriate for school. If I have a whole class doing research it would be impossible to see all the screens at once so we must have certain controls set. It makes a troubling conundrum. I would like to be able to just trust the students and the internet but that is obviously not completely possible so we are stuck with an imperfect system for now. But it really would be nice to only filter out the cyber bullies...

Dropout Prevention Efforts

This article was really interesting to me particularly because I work with the exact students Bruce was talking about. I teach at an alternative high school where we have a population almost exclusively of at risk students who have not been able to succeed in a regular high school. They all have different issues and situations but at the same time they are all there because the regular style high school did not work out for them.

I think it is incredibly important to raise the graduation rates of our students because it is so tough to get far in a job without a high school diploma. One of the biggest problems that I see addressed in the article is that the students who are a drop out rise don’t seem to be addressed until they are about to drop out. At the point where a student is about to drop out it is very tough to get them motivated about finishing school. At my school we have plenty of students who are there to graduate but we also have kids who have had so many failures and have a really hard time controlling themselves long enough to stay in school that they have a really big battle to fight in order to complete and graduate. I think the idea of targeting these students early is a great idea. This is definitely something to be focused on. By the time they get to me that sometimes have such a poor attitude because they feel like the system has either forgotten about them or just doesn’t care about them. We need to find them earlier to show them we do care.

I also think the idea of online classes for these students is a great one that works sometimes. Last week I had two conversations with students about the E2020 (online) classes they were taking with our program. One student came to me asking my advice about how to deal with an online math class that she just didn’t understand. She has had a tough time passing math with the math teacher we have at school so she decided to take the online course and is again having a difficult time, not understanding the material. She is not sure how she will earn the math credits she needs to graduate and so the school is in the process of trying to figure out how to accommodate this situation. The other student came to me excited because she had just completed her online course in health and was so fast that she will be able to do another class, effectively completing two classes in the time she should have been able to complete one. This will allow her to graduate earlier. I think the things we are doing to help our at risk students are great but I think we need to continue to work in order to give our students the best chance they can possibly have.

Joe's non-netbook

This video was pretty entertaining, but it did bring up the idea that things are changing rapidly for our students, but the tools they are using have not been changed for some time. The world of our students is vastly expanding but we continue to hand students the same books. There are some things that would probably work much better on the internet or on the computer. There are some things, however, that I think we still need to use books for. Personally, I find it difficult to stare at a computer screen to read a long passage and would much rather read it out of a book where I don’t have computer glare and eye strain. I do know though that we have to be aware of what kids are into, and I think it would be good to have the opportunity to have interactive texts for students to use.

As an English teacher we read a lot of books, and to be honest I don’t think I like the idea of having all the literature on the computer, but it would be nice to have some of the interactive features to accompany the text. If we were to have computers in our classroom we would be able to do much more to work with the text. As it is, we can go to the computer lab sometimes to work with outside sources. This might be an unpopular opinion because this is a technology in education class, but I don’t think we need to throw out all books. I think we just need to find how to utilize the tools the computer and other technology have to offer and then integrate them into the classroom. I think that is what makes us most effective.

The 7th Standard and the Course Objectives

Honestly, at first glance the course objectives were something I skimmed through and then moved on from because of the sheer length of them at a time when I was busy perusing the rest of the syllabus. Now that I’ve had a chance to go back over them more thoroughly I see that they were very carefully thought out and match very well to the Michigan Professional Standards for technology. So far the standard and the objective that have impacted my teaching most immediately is the inclusion of technology into the lesson plans. This experiment with the two lesson plans has forced me to make a leap with my teaching style. The entire section centered on the blogging responses has also been a great guide for me as I tried to utilize this new skill in my own classroom. I used this as a guide for how I was going to run my blogging exercise with my students. They can be a challenge because of their behavior problems, but this has been a great experience so far with them.

Looking at the professional standards I feel that this class and these objectives have been a great start to diving into these standards that we should be holding ourselves to. It makes me feel good to know that the work we have been doing has been directly correlated to the standards I am held to as a professional.

Michigan Educational Technology Standards

I thought the technology standards went along well with Michigan's technology plan. Overall, I like that we have a set of standards as a guide to where we should be striving to have our students by the time they graduate. I am once again struck that I have never seen these standards before this class. It seems like this is something that all teachers should be aware of and able to utilize.

There are some specific things that will be useful in my class though I would like to know how much of these are supposed to be covered in the core classes and how much is supposed to be covered in specific technology classes. I know that at my school we have five teachers in the high school with one dedicated to computers and technology. I am excited though to be integrating some of the technology into my own classroom so that it’s not just in our tech. classes where the kids are being exposed to it, and these standards are a great guide for me to begin doing that. I just taught my technology lesson. When setting up the lesson I used these standards to help figure out what I was going to do and I can already tell it is incredibly helpful to have these on standby. As it stands, I am still just a beginner at integrating technology into my everyday lessons and I think being able to hold ourselves to these specific standards will be helpful.

Michigan's Educational Technology Plan

I would like to start off by saying that I think the goals for Michigan’s Technology Plan are good ones. My biggest question about it is why haven’t I seen this before I was asked to look at it for this class? It seems as though this should be something we are all looking at or else what is the point of doing it? These are good goals for our state but we teachers should be aware of what the state is trying to accomplish.

One of the goals that really caught my attention was goal 1 strategy 3. This was the goal that was focused on at risk students being able to access technology in a way that was best suited to each student. I think this is a great thing for Michigan to be focused on and this is also something I can see happening at my school right now. As a teacher at an alternative high school it is nice to see we are currently offering technology based classes as one of our 5 options for each hour. We have E2020 classes as well which allow the student to complete a class we wouldn’t otherwise offer because we didn’t have a teacher certified to teach it. They can do it at their own pace and with the assistance of a teacher but not the pressure of a group classroom environment.

These goals correlate very well to the national goals and I think the goals involving leadership by the teachers touch on the topic of my previous blog post. Again, I think it is important for our teachers to take the lead on integrating technology into our schools.

National Educational Technology Plan

I think one of the most important parts of the technology plan was that teaching should be a group effort- that we should be connected in our classrooms to other teachers in our buildings as well as across the country. I think we come from roots of isolation in the classroom where we just shut our doors and go off by ourselves to teach whatever topic we have been assigned, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. When our students are done with us they will enter a world obsessed with technology and they need to be able to connect in a meaningful way in order to be successful.

I think it was also a good point that we as teachers do not involve ourselves in continuing education for technology the way other businesses do. Young teachers probably enter the field with technology at their fingertips but older teachers may not. Also, just because the younger teachers use technology in their everyday lives doesn’t mean they’re using it in the classroom. We need to be dedicated to finding ways to connect our students with technology in the classroom regardless of whether your school has a state of the art technology lab or barely enough computers for the amount of students in the classroom. I think this is one of the big challenges of technology in the classroom and in schools but we need to rise to the occasion.

Review of "Action Research..."

My school spends a lot of time talking about data and how we are going to use it. This year we have started using data director and actually putting all that talk into action. This chapter was interesting because it brought up how important it really is for us as educators to be involved in different types of research in order to best educate our students. I have so far been impressed with the things we can do with the data that is given to us but I also think there are many other things we could do that would be helpful in moving our school forward.

I definitely liked the idea of using evaluation research to determine what programs would be most useful in a school. My biggest concern with this is that it would take a lot of time and organized effort. I work in an alternative program where I have four preps and no prep time. I think it would be difficult to keep my classes going and organized as well as conduct the research during the school year. I think the best way to make this work would be to set up some kind of committee where we could share this burden among a group of teachers.

I think something that was helpful in this chapter was the idea of reflective practice. I don’t know that it always has to be formal where you’re sitting down and going through the list of questions because I think I have always reflected on what I was teaching and how it was working, but it would be smart to sit down and formally evaluate the units after they’re finished so I can remember what needs to be changed or improved upon for the next time I teach it. Overall, the ideas presented in the chapter are good ones. I think it is important to make sure we are integrating the different types of research into our classrooms as much as possible.

Wikiality

If you type Martin Luther King, Jr. (a person I did many a paper on in my days as a student) into Google or Yahoo the first website it provides on both engines is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. One click onto this site can tell you a great wealth of information about this man and all his great accomplishments. A student can scroll down seemingly forever (from a student’s standpoint) and read more than they ever wanted to know and surely enough to fill a paper for a high school class. The problem is that if you continue to scroll down to look at the “references, further reading, and external links” sections you will find a box stating “This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links or by converting links into footnote references. (August 2010)”1 A notable point to the article on Martin Luther King, Jr. is that the page was updated today, the same day I am looking at it meaning something was changed from what I would have seen yesterday.

The best argument against using Wikipedia as the source for your paper is given by Wikipedia itself. They state right on their citation page, “We advise special caution when using Wikipedia as a source for research projects. Normal academic usage of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is for getting the general facts … and to gather keywords, references and bibliographical pointers, but not as a source in itself. … that anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information, which the reader may not recognize.”2 Wikipedia is able to provide good links and keywords to do research on a topic but it is not the place to stop when doing research for a class.

A big issue I have run into while teaching is that students are so exposed to technology casually in their everyday life that when they are asked to use it in a formal way to do research for a project or paper they don’t have the tools to do so. Just because students have had a computer in their houses since they were born doesn’t mean they know how to responsibly search the internet for legitimate information and then cite those findings in a paper. This runs into the issue from the last blog topic. Students don’t necessarily need to be taught the mechanics of how to use the internet but many need someone to guide them through the rough waters of research and citation. We as teachers need to be aware of the fact that students need to be taught how to do this. You wouldn’t send a kid out into the forest without a compass or other way of knowing how to get through and so we shouldn’t send a student out to do research without arming them with the tools to be successful.

1 Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010, September 6). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr

2 Citing Wikipedia (2010, June 14). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

It was a Thursday afternoon and I was sitting at the desk in my classroom during student teaching reading through the papers students had written about Gulliver’s Travels. The papers were getting repetitive and I was about to call it a day when I saw a paper that seemed insightful and interesting. I read through it and found that one of the most interesting things about it was that it contained whole sections that were in gray instead of the standard black typing. It also had purple words that were underlined.

I should regress and give you a little bit of background on the assignment. The class was a senior level English class that was scheduled to graduate in a few short months. The assignment was a paper to accompany a presentation about Gulliver’s Travels. This particular student was working on the interpretation of the satire of the book which we had been working on and researching for several weeks. Accompanying the assignment was also a rubric which stated in bold letters that any student caught plagiarizing would receive a zero on the assignment.

Imagine as a new teacher how upset I was to actually be challenged to enforce a rule that no teacher wants to enforce. I immediately went to the internet and typed in a couple of sentences from the student’s paper. The website pulled up and showed how word for word she had copied and pasted into her paper. I printed off the website and highlighted the similar words on both papers. I then took the papers to my mentor teacher expecting her to back me up on the zero the student should receive. She suggested we call the parent and explain what had happened and what the consequences were.

We made the call and what happened next shocked me. The parent was furious that I, a student teacher, would accuse her daughter of cheating. She then demanded to see the paper. We faxed over both the paper and the website printout. She called back and demanded that the student be able to redo the assignment, saying that her daughter was a senior and about to graduate and why would we give her a zero and bring her grade down to a D. Probably the most unbelievable thing about this was that this parent was also a teacher! My mentor teacher decided we should go with the parents request and allow the student to redo the assignment for less than full credit.

This situation taught me a very valuable lesson. Integrity in this digital age is incredibly important and it is we, the teachers and parents, who need to be sure to teach and enforce it. What lesson does the student who was given a redo learn as she graduated high school and moved onto the much tougher college atmosphere? She learns that if you get caught you get another chance anyways so why not at least try to cheat. She also probably learned to change the font to black and take out the underlines. As Indiana University senior Sarah Wilensky said regarding plagiarism, “The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.” 1 As a high school teacher I have to be the one to hammer that home so students don’t leave my classroom or school unclear about how to cite things in their assignments. I also need to make sure they learn that there are rules and that if they don’t follow them there are severe consequences. I am glad that as I started my career I had an experience that really helped to show me the direction I needed to take in regards to plagiarism.

1 Trip, G. (2010, Aug 1) Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. Nytimes.com
Retrieved August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2