Ah, the old double edged sword problem… On the upside you have this immense collection of resources and information at your fingertips to assist in the molding and shaping of young minds. On the teaching end the internet has already become an indespensible tool that saves hours and days of work and running as a means of gathering necessary info. I can do in an hour what might have burned a good two days of driving back and forth to the library ten years ago. I don’t have to look through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica for the date that Lincoln was assassinated, I can Google it a have the date within moments.
On the downside there’s the too-much-info problem when it comes to student use, especially in the classroom. I wouldn’t even consider letting kids loose on the internet in a K-12 setting. Even with a dozen filters and Net-Nanny-style programs you never know what might slip through. I’ve ended up in very scary places while looking for (what I thought to be, at least) completely benign info. God knows what a 9th grader who was intentionally trying to find something they shouldn’t would be capable of. It’s about the same thing as dropping a bus load of kids off in the red light district in Amsterdam, handing them a wad of cash and saying “have fun, kids!”
