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!”
4 responses so far ↓
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Jackie
// Feb 17, 2006 at 8:05 am
I appreciate your willingness to see both sides of the Internet issue. At the same time, although I see the dangers of the Internet I feel that the weakness in your analogy to the Amsterdam field trip is that we are not driving students to the Internet nor are we handing them a “wad of cash.” They already know how to get there on their own–and they already have the cash–an internet connection and a browser!!
The trick is that we need to give them directions, tools, skills . . . ethics?!! . . . for navigating this excursion when they’re with us and when they’re on their own. Of course, I would not advocate letting students “loose” on the Internet in a school lab setting without setting parameters. Naturally, I pre-select sites for my 1st-5th graders. This way, I can model sites I feel are credible, etc. But at some point, they will be using a search engine to search for information on a topic.
What are your thoughts on helping students find their way in this situation? (c;
2
jerry
// Feb 20, 2006 at 6:02 pm
I have brought my classes down to the computers and have never had a problem with them using the internet. I am in the classroom with them and helping them. They also need to have direction in where to go. So I think the key is supervision.
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