We Used to Have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

When I was a neophyte technological midget (last month), I was confident the Internet was a very scary place with hackers, pedophiles and con artists behind each page. I was afraid and did not participate in many social networking sites, photo sharing, etc. I am still afraid but for a larger variety of reasons.

Copyrights! Fair Use! Litigation! What if I publish something on my blog or site (like a clip art image) and someone sues me for using it? I wonder if I would be held responsible if a student did the same thing while completing an assignment for my class? What if the district allowed blogging as an educational tool and a child is psychologically hurt by a response? Could I be sued?

I can teach my students to be careful, responsible and lawfully correct but the more I read about using technology in education, the more complicated and time consuming it becomes and the more people are involved. As many of the articles in Chapter 7, Teachers Discovering Technology point out, technology in education cannot be successful without collaboration from the school principal, central office support, parental support, good planning, good curriculum planning, teacher education and excellent lesson plans. These are the same needs for any curricular topic in schools whether you use technology or not. I believe an additional point should be included and that is diligent monitoring of student computer use.

The school I work in currently does not allow stud ens to access any communication sites. E-mail, blogging sites, personal websites and even TV sites are blocked. Flash drives or disc's are not allowed. Our school is Internet safe but at what cost? I wonder if there was some way teachers could check all outgoing messages from their students and then have the power to release them to the WWW, would my school allow more communication?

It seems the topic of Internet safety and use for education has more questions than answers.