Week 3 - Web Technology

This week, we discussed Web Technologies. This was definitely eye opening. It brought up the reality that kids know way more about the internet than I do, even at 21 years old. This is great and scary. Younger people can teach us many things through their knowledge of the web. They also have access to infinite resources through the web which can expand their world knowledge. However, this can be very frightening in the sense that parents have no idea what their kids are up to because they don't always understand the risks behind the internet.

Web Technologies can be useful in education through just knowledge of them for parents and students. In such a technological age, as educators, we need to make sure that plenty of technology is used in our instruction. This helps the kids think that we aren't dinosaurs that don't know anything about our students or the changing times. This will also be good for informing the students and the parents on the risks (physical and emotional) and benefits of using the web. The reading for this week was great. I wrote a paper in high school on cyberbullying so seeing this in the reading excited me. It is important to edcuate not only students but parents on the proper use of the web. It's also important that they know that it's not only people the don't know that they need to worry about but very often people they do know that can pose worse threats. It's important for kids to see that although myspace and facebook may be fun and they may look cool if they have the most "friends". It's dangerous. Some of their "friends" could be online predators as well as kids they go to school with that could use these technologies to bully them. Also, these sites give a false sense of security to these kids and they might share more information than they should on the web.



These YouTube videos are kinda funny but also scary. Can you imagine someone saying all those things to you? After hearing it so many times, you would start to believe it. That's even scarier. I chose these short videos to give examples of how cyberbullying can cause hurt and resentment.




This YouTube video helps to show how anything you post is public. It really is available on the WORLD wide web. So be careful.