As educators, we’re online a lot. We enter our grades and attendance online, we e-mail parents, we store our lesson plans electronically and we sometimes check our personal e-mail accounts or online bank statements. In other words, teachers aren’t so different from most people: we’ve become used to using the computer for all kinds of work and personal tasks and we wonder how we ever lived before Google, Excel, and Farmville.
The teen years are full of drama and staring at one’s self in the mirror – for hours. It’s also about socializing. When I was a teen, I remember sneaking up to the den to make a covert phone call to a boy late on a school night. We had a code: one ring and hang up meant call me. It drove my parents nuts.
Now as a parent, I race my daughter to the bathroom in the morning and I feel around her pillow at night for the contraband cell phone.
Chelsie, a vibrant freshman in third period, is no longer vibrant. Most days, she’s not even present. When she does show up to class, she often comes early and alone. Her grades have slipped. She makes up excuses in the computer lab about why she can’t go online or she pleads a stomach ache and heads for the nurse’s office. When she’s in class, Chelsie prefers to work alone and not in groups. If other students ask her to join a group, she snaps at them.
Chelsie’s change in behavior is consistent with that of a cyberbully victim, Hindjua and Patchin wrote in Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying.
Like it or not, what happens in cyberspace doesn’t stay in cyberspace. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 15 percent of our students have received a nude or nearly nude photo or video of someone they know. Four percent are sending sexual photos or videos of themselves.
As teachers we know that the schoolhouse gate doesn’t serve as a barrier to information from the real world. The sexual text messages and instant messages (sexting) our teens send to one another during their online evenings can create a lot of trouble during the offline school day.
Your students are spending a lot of their free time online. Think of the number of hours you estimate they spend online. Double it. The doubled number is probably closer to the truth.
According to the Norton Online Living Report 2009, parents believe their children spend 21 hours online. The reality is that students in twelve countries reported spending 39 hours online. Don’t tell me these kids don’t have time to finish their assignments or clean their rooms.
If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.
Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs.
We hate SPAM as much as you do. You have our promise not to sell or share your email address — ever!
Shopping Cart
My Account