Digital Badge #I

For this blog my classmates read and blogged about chapter 4. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and a few weeks ago, my teacher alerted me and told me that I had done the wrong chapter. So since I have already blogged about chapter 4, I am going to blog about the chapter that I should have done a few weeks ago, which is chapter 5. The things in Chapter 5 that I would like to discuss is Wikipedia being used in classrooms, Copyright infringement, and cyber bulling.

I always feel like I go back to previous blogs I have posted and I state the same things over and over again, however, I feel that these blogs are in conjunction with each other. So with that said, I am a child of the 90s. I remember doing middle school projects and having to go to the library to look up things in world book encyclopedias. Even when I was in high school (I graduated in 2005) I had to have 4 reference from books and 2 from the internet. It was a widely common knowledge that the things on the internet were not as factual back in the day. Fast forward to today, and we have many viable options as far as internet research goes. Wikipedia is a very controversial topic among teachers and professors. The fact that it is a community written encyclopedia is often the factor that many educators have a problem with. For example, a few years ago, comedian Sinbad had woke up with calls from his daughter. His daughter asked him if he was ok. After assureing her he was fine, his daughter told him that his Wikipedia page had stated that he had died. After getting it cleared up, it was reported (again) that he had died of an heart attack. Anybody can put information on this site, which is why this is an highly controversial site. I personally think that most of the information is true on Wikipedia, but question what is and what isn't. So as a future educator, I would allow students to use Wikipedia, only if they could back it up with another viable source.

Copyright material is always a very scary thing to me. I value my education and have many times been passed with plagiarism and copying/cheating while in college. Once because I simply didn't know. I had copied sentences from a book for homework and didn't cite my material. My teacher let me off the hook because she genuinely believed that I had no idea (which I, being 18 at the time, was very grateful for this). Then while in Art history, we had to review the movie Psycho. I got mixed up and gave a summary of the movie. My art history teacher accused me of copying and pasting my information from websites. This I knew was wrong. I had spent hours working on this and coming up with a great summary with my own words. And I was not going to get in trouble with plagiarism again. I wrote her a strongly worded letter apologizing to her for the misunderstanding of a review and summary and would understand any docking of grade for this, but that I had put in a lot of work and hours in to writing a summary in my own words, and if she thought I had plagiarized then she needed to come up with the proof and there wouldn't be any. I believe I got a B- on the homework. A year later a friend copied a test paper word for word with mine, and of course I was in the dean's office. I was thankful my friend had came clean and told them that she had copied me, But after these situations, I have decided that I am done with these problems. I try to stay clear of anything that can become copyright issues. I know that after doing these blogs that you can only use domain free items and is happy to do this.

The last thing I would like to talk about is cyber bulling. This isn't something I had to deal with growing up with too much. The main ways students are cyber bulling others are through sites such as facebook, snapchat, twitter, and instagram. I didn't have any of these when I was a kid. Although we did have chat rooms, I wasn't allowed on them and there for, I didn't notice it too much. I know as an adult and a fan of youtube, that people can be mean when they are not face to face with you. They tend to feel a little more powerful behind a keyboard. I know I have talked about this recently, but I was able to teach technology in a summer program a few years ago. In this class the kids were able to maintain a kidblog. They were given strict orders to be careful with what they put on these blogs and that I had the power to see all of their post. They knew if they wrote bad things about another camp member than I would report them and they were kicked out of the program. Unfortunately, the district that we were in wanted me (a non teacher in their county) to be kicked out of a technology program. I later became the photography teacher and I did that for the rest of the summer so we only were able to do two weeks of blogging. But the kids had a blast and they were very well behaved. I know that is not the case, and especially when you think no one is watching you write horrible stuff about someone. One of my campers a family friend of mine and she had me as a friend on facebook. I noticed that she and another girl were tearing this other girl apart. The things that they said about this girl were awful. The extremely sad thing was they were in 5th 6th and 7th grade. To put that in another perspective, they were 10, 11, and 13 years old. I am an adult and I don't say the words they were saying about the 10 year old. I told (the family friend) what she was doing was awful and even if the other girl was saying it, she was agreeing and how it would make my friend feel she was the one being bullied. I think I resolved the issue, but there are many more cases out there that turn deadly and for a 10 year old to have to experience this is just plain heartbreaking.

In conclusion, as a future educator, I will do my best to be fair with Wikipedia, teach my students about copyrights and the importance of copyright in college, and bullying in general, but also online bullying.

Reference:
Maloy, R., O’Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.