Reflection on the Ethics Project

This project afforded me the opportunity to analyze security on the internet. I did not know many of the things that I learned as I researched my portion of the project as well as the other group members' portions. With such wonderful and vast opportunities in the world, always comes the adversity to them. In the case of safety on the internet, many people attempt and succeed to steal personal information, pollute minds with visual and verbal filth, and steal identities. Luckily, there are sources for protecting one's self from such threats. I found many sights that offer services ranging from provision of firewalls to protect information, to providing filters for internet safety.
My question is this-How can we as educators provide a well informed information base for our students? we need to provide an information base for them that they can draw from to inform themselves about the dangers of the internet and the need for security of temporal and moral identity. A temendous portion of adolescents spend much of their time on the internet and in chat and messenger exchanges. Technology needs to be harnessed in the classroom in positive, and yet, informative ways. This will be one of the first things that I approach in my student teaching semester, beginning in January.The students need exposure to the real threats they face on the internet. I read a source, the other day, that labeled secondary aged adolescents as the number one users of the internet. If this is the case, should they not have the most urgent exposure to knowlegde of hazards and to safety?. While many of them do not run the risk of exposing their personal bank information and other private, important info on the internet, they can still destroy themselves by giving other information. A 16 year-old student who gets his or her social security number on the internet in the "Safe" arena of information pages for sights and services, can be ruined by the time he or she is 19. Before the adolsecent has even left his or her teen years, he or she is devestated and will spend many years cleaning up his/her name, credit, and other personally connected aspects of their lives. Exposure to pornography, vulgarity, and the extreme end of freedom of speech and expression is an inevitable blow to a happy and successful future. I have never met a user of porn or a vulgar and distasteful person that I could label as a joyful of happy person. Technology is a marvelous realm of education and knowledge, like the world has never known. I am of the opinion that technology in the classroom is often, the key to increasing quality knowledge acquisition in the students that will transend the secondary experience into the world of reality after school. Technology is one of, what I consider, only several keys to education success in school. Most often, students will be safe from demeaning and illegal materials while researching and exploring the World Wide Web because of properly placed filters. What about at home? What if a student chats with a petafile and gives personal information, and let alone, constructs a relationship with such a person and similar anonymous people. What if the student is uneducated about the the simplicity that is involved in stealing information, in these days? The results, as we know in retrospect, are damaging.
In my classes, this semester, I have been told that I should not try to play a role in my future students' personal lives and that I am not there to be a friend. I respect such opinions of my professors and naiive student teachers. Well, I don't see how one can't be a friend and a confidant to the students. They spnd most of their adolescence in classrooms with teachers. Whether people like it or not, teachers often have greater influences on kids than parents and are the people who they spend most of their time with until they graduate. So to the idle professors of education professionalism, I suggest that thought. There are appropriate boundaries that are not to be crossed, I do understand that. Yet, I do not like be told what I can and can't do. The definition of Professionalism is wrongly assumed to be dictated by an elite few who will take every opportunity to share with us that they have been there and know everything, and of course, we do not. I speak with such candor in this paragraph because I feel that some educators hinder the students' ability to protect themselves from threats on the internet. They do not give enough exposure to the threats of the internet and the world, many of which are specifically targeting their age and interest group. The secondary classroom is an environment of education of reality just as much as it is for teaching academic knowledge. While professing to be the only experts, claiming that they are the model for defending students' integrity and upholding the standard of excellence (which they usually indicate in 2-3 of their comments a day, especially here at BYU,) many are not invested in helping students. I think that a real teacher will provide the positive aspects of technology in the classroom and defend the students'integrity and right to a well packaged education, and yet allow them to understand that they have to make the decisions to be successful and learned individuals. I am thankful for technology, from PowerPoint to internet to creative softwares, for opening up the realm of potential for students in school. But we have to be opened-minded educators who know how to suppress our personal agendas and keep the students' educational, temporal, and moral exisiences as the mainstays for our purposes of teaching. The nature and the object of the ethics class project assigned to me has extracted this reflection from me.