Grammatista

    Over the past five months or so that I have been learning about censorship and Myspace in schools I have learned many important lessons. The first and most apparent lesson is that technology is a insanely great tool and to not use it because you lack the necessary training isn’t a good enough answer anymore. Before this class I was oblivious to RSS technology and my blogging skills were rudimentary at best; but now I feel that I have mastered both of these up and coming technologies. Five months, that is all it took to master these new innovations, which forces me to beg the question what else can I learn in five months? How many teachers out there just refuse to learn about new technologies because they feel they are already too far behind to start now? I know from personal experience that many teachers who are in their mid forties and fifties simply refuse to try anything new, in regards to technology, because they are unable to see the benefit from these new fads. To those humbuggers I say this: teaching is not an exact science, students are constantly changing and if we have any chance of getting through to them, we have to change with them.

My specific topic was social networking sites in schools and I found, through pretty extensive research, that this will be an uphill battle. The media, most schools, and a lot of parents all believe that these sites hold no educational merit whatsoever. From all that I have learned about the dangers of social networking sites I still truly believe their benefits outweigh their faults. To allow an otherwise extremely shy and quite student the ability to put in their two cents via a web Blog is awesome; how can we say that this isn’t a good thing? And in response to the anti-social networking people who are going to attack my last few statements: I know that there are a lot of dangers when you mix kids and the internet, but there are also a lot of dangers when you allow your student to walk to the bus everyday or play contact sports, but unlike those two the dangers of the internet have not been approached with nearly the same vigor. If the parents, students, and teachers work together to better educate and protect our students we will have an unbelievable resource open up to us. I think that it is a matter of time before our educational society gets on the technology bandwagon; I for one will be pushing the change right out of the gate.

I attended the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company’s presentation of Macbeth. I think the single most important thing that I took away from that presentation is how the play had been adapted to suit its audience. By suit its audience I don’t mean that the words were changed into non-standard English or the lines were said in a south Boston accent, everything about the play was still Shakespearian; they just gave it a little different edge. They achieved this different edge by performing the play in a “post apocalyptic punk” lens; they dressed in mid eighties punk attire and used weapons like an axe, a switchblade, and hunting knives. These slight changes in attire and weaponry actually made it a lot more interesting for me because it was different. As an English student going to be an English teacher I have seen my fair share of Shakespearian productions, whether they were online, a dvd, or in person, and just these slight tweaks to the format made this particular presentation stand out amongst the crowd. Another thing that the Pigeon Creek Company did was to present this play on a “thrust” stage; which meant that they were on the same level as everyone else, not separated by a big stage and lighting changes. This little change allowed for the actors to get up close and personal with the audience which essentially forced the students to not only pay attention but stay alert because at any moment an actor could be talking to you. I really like this because it was both interesting and it mandated that people paid attention. In my future classrooms, if I do indeed have to teach Shakespeare, I plan on teaching it through a more relatable lens like the Pigeon Creek Company did. It is simple techniques like this that allow students to become more involved and interested in what they are learning about and as a future teacher I’m thinking that having my students involved and interested is at least half the battle.

The article that I read came out of the Northwest Arkansas News Source and it was called “School bullies move online; rules tricky to write, enforce.” As one could guess from the title it is another testament to how social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook are going to wreck the world. Over the past few months that I have been researching this topic I have noticed more and more of these kinds of articles. However, unlike other articles that I have read, this article depicts how a state legislature has decided to not just be another group of anti-Myspacers, but really set in place some rules and guidelines that will actually help students in regards to internet safety.

Cyberbullying was the heart of the Arkansas legislative issue, with a particular incident being the focal point for most of the debate. Billy Wolfe, a junior high school student in Fayetteville, AR, was a victim of cyberbullying,”

“Wolfe sued several classmates, claiming that they had injured him after soliciting classmates to physically harm him. They did it on Facebook, an online social-networking site popular among high school and college students… Wolf’s March 6 filing in Washington County Circuit Court accuses a group of students of physically assaulting him in March 2007 as he tried to leave on of his classes at Woodland Junior High School.”

This article goes on to explain how Penney Wolfe, Billy’s mother, had spoken to the principal of the school on numerous occasions trying to stop the violence before it happened and she received little to no help. In my opinion, even though Facebook is where the problem started, this eventual incident could have easily been taken care of by the administration at the school and to solely blame an internet site for a student getting assaulted at school is silly; the responsibility of blame goes much further than that.

That point being said later in the article a statistic was given that the Arkansas legislature used when deciding whether or not to implement tighter internet safety policies: “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that 34 percent of students have been the victim of cyberbullying, 21 percent of students have perpetrated online harassment, and 68 percent of those harassed online also experience off-line aggression.”

With statistics like this it makes my task, which is promoting the use of social networking sites in schools, tougher by the second. But what I think is an overlooked idea in this article as well as in our society is that, like all new technologies there are going to be many setbacks. Nonetheless schools, teachers, and students need to work positively to ensure that all of this new technology can be incorporated; because the gains will definitely outweigh the work.

School Bullies Move Online

by Northwest Arkansas News Source

6 April, 2008

Full Article

“Virginia Schools Teach ‘Net Safety Lessons” is the article that I read for this post. This article contains many disturbing statistics, in regards to pedophiles online, however it carries an overall positive message of the internet. I think the last line of the article serves as a great summation of the entire article as well as sums up my feelings in general about MySpace and Facebook, “No one wants to curb teen from using Facebook and MySpace, he [Attorney General Bob McDonnell] said, but in the internet age, it’s necessary to reinforce the old warning: ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’”

            This quite understanding quote comes after these staggering statistics: “in 2006 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children found that about 13 percent of internet users ages 10 to 17 had received unwanted sexual solicitations. Four percent of those youths reported being asked for nude or sexually explicit photographs of themselves.”

This quote is to say the least a blow to my cause; because at the end of the day there is no technology in the world that is worth the safety of our kids and students. However there are people out there fighting on behalf of student safety. People like Judi Westberg Warren president of Web Wise Kids, “a non profit group funded by the federal government and corporations such as Verizon and Symantec to proved schools with no-cost internet safety lessons for 11-16 year olds.” Along with Web Wise Kids, Virginia has developed training for teachers through their “Department of Education office of educational technology” which “helps schools educate parents, including encouraging families to use filtering software and put their computers in parts of the house where they can easily be seen.”

In my opinion the attitude that the Virginia board of education is taking on the issue of Myspace and other social networking sites is the right one. They are acknowledging the fact that students are going to use the sites no matter what and thus it’s just better to educate the students, parents and teachers to help protect kids when they are online opposed to just telling students to just not use it; because kids are still kids and rebellion is just in their nature. More schools need to adopt a pro-technology agenda like Virginia has so that eventually all of these great innovations can be used an educational tools rather than the distractions that it they are currently.    

Virginia Schools Teach Net Safety Lessons

by Associated Press

6 April 2008

Full Article

Over the past seven weeks all kinds of articles have been filing into my Google Reader account but the articles that come in more than any others are articles that use scare tactics to push parents and school districts away from computer (technology) use. I can’t begin to count how many articles I’ve read that include anti-technology propaganda in it. The most recent article I read was just too much for me not to comment on; so here I go.

This article, Rep. Pushes Internet Safety Policies for Public Schools, in my opinion is the holy grail of anti-technology propaganda. It starts out with this quote:

“You can lock the doors and windows, hold their hand at the mall, and buy training wheels for their bikes. But a major danger facing kids today is right above the keyboard.” The article goes on to say “They [internet predators] groom their victims” (Mason).

In short the article details new legislation that will make internet usage at public schools “safer”, but what does “safer” mean in regards to internet usage? The article never really goes into great detail about what the legislation or schools for that matter plan on doing to make the internet “safer” but one quote in the article leads me to a clear understanding of what “safer” means to the schools.

“Swampscott reminds the user that his or her RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH is suspended when using the school’s network” (Mason).

I am not an overly optimistic person who believes that all students would use technological resources in a productive manner; but when did it get ok to presume that all students were going to misuse their technological resources? To suspend students Free Speech may be legal for schools to do but where are we as a society going to draw the line? Today students can’t write about their feelings on their personal blogs while at school, tomorrow they can’t have personal blogs at all, and next Wednesday they are going to be monitored at all times while on the internet.

From an educational stand point, how is a teacher going to promote the use of a blog assignment when students are not even allowed to access the site to begin with? The ironic part about all of this that I’m advocating the use of technology in classrooms, like blogs or social networking sites, through the use of a social network. I know for a fact that I take my writing more seriously when it is going to be published on my blog because it is out there for the world to see. I would love to have my students feel the sense of accomplishment I get when someone reads my blog and appreciates my ideas but if anti-technology propaganda trends continue I fear they will never know that feeling.

Rep Pushes Internet Safety Policies for Public Schools

by Salem News (Edward Mason)

February 14, 2008

This article details students use of MySpace which caused them to be suspended from athletics. The tag line for this article is “Blood, Chains, leather and a 17 year-old girls” (Newell). I’ll admit it sounds pretty promiscuous but do coaches and teachers have the right to suspend or censor their students use of their personal social networking site? Should we even allow coaches the freedom to act as yet another overbearing intrusive authority in these kids’ lives? The coach who headed this crusade against the 17 year old girl said this:

“What she found on one of them [her students personal sites] made her realize she needed to do something. ‘There was a lot of Vampire-Y stuff’; ‘It was getting hard-core. It was inappropriate for a 17 year old” (Newell).

After I read this I had only one question. Who gives this coach the right to decide what is appropriate for a 17 year old girl, who is not her own daughter, to do on her free time? From a critical pedagogy stand point wouldn’t it have been more constructive for the coach to ask why this girl was acting like this? What lead her to embody such a dark persona? The coach’s language passes judgment on this girl almost immediately: “lots of Vampire-Y stuff”; this language this is used to essentially point a finger at the girl and say “sorry you’re not like everyone else and because of that you’re wrong.” The coach went on to force the student to change her personal page in order to stay apart of the team. The article did go on to elaborate on problems that other coaches had including their students and alcohol use. I will by no means defend this; these students acted inappropriately and were punished accordingly. I know from personal experience how much influence a coach has on their student-athletes and it pains me to hear of a coach forcing a student to change a personal web page, that wasn’t illegal in anyway, because I wonder what lesson the student took from it. Did she think hey: “maybe what I posted was a little out there?” or was it more along the lines of “being creative and expressing myself only leads me to catch flack from my coaches and teachers.” If teachers, coaches, and schools keep limiting student’s creativity we might just end up with a large group of very bland individuals.

MySpace Pages Pose Headache for Coaches

By The Indianapolis Star (Matt Newell)

February 7, 2008

Over the past seven weeks all kinds of articles have been filing into my Google Reader account but the articles that come in more than any others are articles that use scare tactics to push parents and school districts away from computer (technology) use. I can’t begin to count how many articles I’ve read that include anti-technology propaganda in it. The most recent article I read was just too much for me not to comment on; so here I go.

This article, Rep. Pushes Internet Safety Policies for Public Schools, in my opinion is the holy grail of anti-technology propaganda. It starts out with this quote:

“You can lock the doors and windows, hold their hand at the mall, and buy training wheels for their bikes. But a major danger facing kids today is right above the keyboard.” The article goes on to say “They [internet predators] groom their victims” (Mason).

In short the article details new legislation that will make internet usage at public schools “safer”, but what does “safer” mean in regards to internet usage? The article never really goes into great detail about what the legislation or schools for that matter plan on doing to make the internet “safer” but one quote in the article leads me to a clear understanding of what “safer” means to the schools.

“Swampscott reminds the user that his or her RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH is suspended when using the school’s network” (Mason).

I am not an overly optimistic person who believes that all students would use technological resources in a productive manner; but when did it get ok to presume that all students were going to misuse their technological resources? To suspend students Free Speech may be legal for schools to do but where are we as a society going to draw the line? Today students can’t write about their feelings on their personal blogs while at school, tomorrow they can’t have personal blogs at all, and next Wednesday they are going to be monitored at all times while on the internet.

From an educational stand point, how is a teacher going to promote the use of a blog assignment when students are not even allowed to access the site to begin with? The ironic part about all of this that I’m advocating the use of technology in classrooms, like blogs or social networking sites, through the use of a social network. I know for a fact that I take my writing more seriously when it is going to be published on my blog because it is out there for the world to see. I would love to have my students feel the sense of accomplishment I get when someone reads my blog and appreciates my ideas but if anti-technology propaganda trends continue I fear they will never know that feeling.

Rep Pushes Internet Safety Policies for Public Schools

by Salem News (Edward Mason)

February 14, 2008

This article is about a few kids in an inner-city middle school in Chicago that were suspended for staging fights that were intended to be broadcast on YouTube. The article starts out by outlining the particulars of the incident.

“The 8^th graders were using the camera phone to watch video of a fake fight they staged in a bathroom at Benjamin Middle School. They had filmed multiple rounds of a shoving match_ no more than a couple of minutes long_ and planned to post it on YouTube” (Ortiz)

As I read this article I immediately thought that this is the exact kind of incident that I should be crusading against; kids misusing technology which inherently leads to teachers/parents/school districts banning the use of such technology. Thus, when a teacher attempts to use technology like YouTube in an educational setting they are shot down. Yet, as I read on in the article all of these feelings of disappointment that came from the fear of yet another school hopping on the anti-technology bandwagon disappeared. Why did they disappear one may ask? They disappeared because the Chicago area school district did something that I never thought they would; opposed to cutting back already stringent technology use in their district they decided to consider educating students on how to use technology in a productive way.

“Administrators at Benjamin are considering offering classes on blogging and video techniques to channel misguided activities into productive learning” (Ortiz).

Even the faint notion of acceptance, “considering offering classes”, in my opinion is a huge step in the right direction. If schools decide to embrace the use of technology like YouTube or MySpace in their classes who knows what their students could create. Not only has Chicago public schools started to help their students with their use of technology but they are not helping “arm” the faculty with the tools they need:

“Since 2006, nearly 1,000 security personnel in Chicago public schools have received special training on MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and other popular sites to help maintain safety” (Ortiz).

I have never been a huge advocate of policing student’s lives while they are not in your classroom but I think this training for security personnel is a great idea. If school districts truly want to introduce technology into their classrooms, in a meaningful way, they will need faculty that is just as experienced with the technology as the students are. This article started because of a disciplinary action taken on tech savvy students but I think it gains it real merit by the reaction of the school district at hand. I personally applaud the foresight and courage of the district’s administrators.

Students Staging Fights for YouTube Publicity

by Chicago Tribune (Vikki Ortiz)

February 18, 2008

1. Laura – Religious Coach

2. Travis – Teacher Sick Day

3. Leanne – Voucher Program

4. Mark – Prison Literacy

5. Brad – Killer “F”

6. Laura – D.C. Catholic School

7. Brad – Dad’s Homework

8. Travis – Tune In

9. Molly – Overseas Reading

10. Desi – Uniforms

This article was shocking and quite disturbing for me to read. I find myself in a conundrum because I want to promote social networking sites for educational uses, but it seems that like most things, the few are going to wreck it for the many. The article talks about a group of teachers, none are named, that used social networking sites to contact students in inappropriate ways. I’m going to point out the flaws in the article and ideology of the school district, but by no means do I want anyone to misconstrue this as me advocating inappropriate teacher-student relationships.

As the article states: “Hundreds of teachers throughout local suburban school districts have profiles on popular online social networks including MySpace and Facebook. While not in and of itself an issue, the question of what is proper and professional contact between students and teachers outside the classroom is. And some of the teachers’ personal sites have raised significant issues concerning the propriety of that extracurricular relationship and the privacy of minors” (Calandriello).

This article starts with an unbiased “voice”, yet as it goes on further and further I can see that this article does have the media based hatred for these social networking sites that I often see. I think the question raised by Calandriello is a valid question. What is proper and professional behavior after 3:00 o’clock for a student/teacher relationship? Now for most people this is not a question that needs to be asked because your conscience and ideology makes sure that you follow the correct set of scruples, but for others it’s not that easy. It is because of the “others” category that this needs to be addressed in literature (i.e. contract, school policies, etc…). If school districts are going to punish and reprimand teachers for these sites, they need to address up front what is and is not acceptable. The article points to three separate cases of teachers using social network sites. The first teacher is a male high school teacher/coach who has a MySpace site that has questionable friends.

“One high school male teacher and athletic coach’s open MySpace profile has photos of predominantly young female and male “friends” along with sex-related sayings, pictures, and videos. His MySpace “friends,” which have to be accepted by the creator of the profile, were predominantly between the ages of 14 and 18 and lived anywhere from Bartlett to Hawaii. Their headlines ranged from “Mr. Horny” to “I’m too depressed to go on. You’ll be sorry when I’m gone” to “Rock my socks off.” His friends’ posted photos ranged from a naked girl’s body under a see-through sheet to a boy posing in boxer shorts who appears to be an athlete the teacher coaches. This same teacher had a Rascal Flatts music video entitled Take Me There in which two young boys stare at a young girl strip slowly and seductively down to her white bikini” (Calandriello).

Though I don’t agree that he exercised good judgment by befriending so many young friends, he hasn’t done anything wrong. How can a school district punish a teacher for having a “MySpace friend” who has less than appropriate things on THEIR sites? Does that mean school districts shouldn’t hire people who have accused murderers in their extended family? Because by the logic being used above “your friend’s faults can be used against you.” The article goes on to describe a female teacher was not as innocent. I was able to defend the male teacher because I truly didn’t think he did anything wrong. The female teacher acted inexcusably and I will have no defense of her. I think she stepped over moral and professional lines.

The first teacher: “On a 25-year-old high school teachers open Facebook profile, she displays alcohol-related pictures along with sex-related connotations. Nearly 150 pictures are posted, several containing images of alcohol and behavior including the teacher bending over with a wet spot on the back of her pants and a girl pointing to it. This same teacher is holding a can of Miller Lite while placing a “V” over her mouth while sticking her tongue out and licking another girl’s tongue. She also had an assortment of “Happy Hour Drinks,” a picture of a sex toy and a pseudo-stripper name of “Chesty Sunnytower” on her profile. She labels one of her photo albums as “Since we have to supervise middle schoolers that are pretty much doing soft core porn … we like to entertain ourselves” (Calandriello).

This teacher must have forgotten to think when she did this. It is cases like this that make it hard to defend the use of social networking sites. I will take these cases with a grain of salt and keep looking for the cases when social networking sites offer educational benefit. Sort of like right now. Thanks for reading.

A Tangled Web? by Erin Caladriello

The Courier News Online.

28 January 2008.

Full Article