Reflection for the Week

To Surf or Not To Surf

I think the internet is a great tool to use in Education. There are endless sites out there for teachers to use in curriculum and to help them in teacher development. I have found the UEN Website to be very useful already in my journey of becoming a teacher. I remember my younger years when there was no such thing as the internet. I spent a lot of precious time in the library. Sometimes the local library didn’t have what I needed so I had to travel to a University, which was very inconvenient. The internet offers great convenience to educators who have very little extra time on their hands. The internet is also a great tool for students. My daughter, who is a senior has put the internet to use several times through her years of school. Interestingly though, she had a research paper for her AP College Writing class and was required to go to the BYU Library for her research because her teacher said that the internet is not always reliable. I believe with the information we learned from Kathy Schrock we can navigate our way through the internet’s viable sources.

We should evaluate the internet sites we use because we don’t want the information we get to be wrong or biased. There are sites out there that have an agenda. When teachers or students are looking for information it is important to follow the steps to properly evaluate each website we use. If we use information that is invalid it could end up being like a piece of juicy gossip. We all know the advertisement slogan, “you tell two friends and so on and so on”. Pretty soon George Washington had ten wives or Abraham Lincoln had a lisp. Some people believe all information from the internet is gospel truth.

A good source to use to evaluate a website is from Kathy Schrock. She asks herself five questions when using a website. The first question is who is the author? Are they an expert? The second question is what is the websites purpose? Are they trying to sell something? The third question is when was the site created, updated and last worked on? The fourth question is where did the information on the website come from? The last question is the information useful for my purpose? One other evaluation I would use is to look for the ~mark in the URL. If that mark is in the URL it isn’t a valid resource.

I have a great responsibility on my hands as a teacher to help my students be safe surfers. First of all any computers used at the school should be protected with firewalls etc. so my students aren’t a victim to something they don’t want to see. Or some students might want try to see something they aren’t supposed to so it is vital that the school has those safeguards in place. It is also important for me to teach internet safety in the class. The school where I work just had internet safety week with many activities. The theme was Crash and Tell. It is very important to get this information to my students because unfortunately there are many predators, cyber bullies, etc. lurking. I was appalled at how many predators are on myspace. I am sure it is only going to get worse. If my students know the safety issues, they will be protected and won’t get burned!