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.