Cyberbullying

90% of the kids seem to ignore it and not be good digital citizens to stand up to the bully and say something. You must teach and address digital citizenship in the classroom.

I tried finding statistics on how many deaths have been connected to cyber bullying, but could not find any.

I wanted to write this post because as I was reading the news today I saw yet another young student decided to take their life because they were bullied online.

Educators, parents, adults, mentors, and everyone on the internet must teach young people to be good citizens online and be models of that. After reading about the suicide I found another article that showed some online users who were being models and I had faith in the online community. They ignored the harmful comments and tried to rid them of their ignorance. Then the person who posted the photo and harsh comments apologized and said they had learned a lot. It made me smile and wish this ending happened more than suicide.

This xkcd comic called sticks and stones sums it up well. The rollover text says that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words make me think I deserved it." The words you say online make a difference.

Here is another post that relates to cyber bullying. It sums up that killing yourself should never be an option. 

Schools need a system in place to address bullying and cyberbullying. An interesting solution I read about is that students can send in anonymous text messages to teachers and administrators. That way a student is not seen tattling in the office just to get further abuse for tattling. Almost all students have phones or mobile devices and are on them all the time. People will just think that they are texting a friend not a teacher. This could be used to report cyberbullying and I think it would be possible to include links or copies of online conversation in the message. This could allow adminstrators real time live reports of bullying as well and stop a fight as soon as possible. It is an interesting solution to the bullying problem that should be explored. To find out more please read this article.

If you want ideas about how to address this issue and what resources you can use please see the following posts.

Digital Citizenship
Digital Citizenship lecture from technology conference

Online Education

This is another really good ted talk. This one focuses on online education. However I have some qualms about some of the things she talks about.

I totally agree that everyone should have access to education and higher education. She talks about people who don't easily have access in other countries. She also mentions those who can not afford the education. The online platform helps reach people across the globe. She also designed the classes so technology would be doing most of the work and so it would keep teacher work loads done therefore the price would stay low.

The online platform she talks about moves away from the lecture based format which is really important. The example about students not processing information because they are still taking notes really resonated. I was constantly writing. Students need to engage with the material. She points out that the video lecture will periodically pause to ask students a comprehension question. I have started doing that in my own classroom teaching. I teach one concept then have students solve a problem over that concept to check in that they understand. This breaks up the lecture and makes sure everyone understands. I have them solve the problem on their personal whiteboard so I could see their work or mistakes. The online platform can automatically give instant personalized feedback. She talks about how software and technology has advanced to the point where the computer can give feedback on a variety of inputs. However the solution they have come up with for papers and critical thinking is that students peer grade papers or self grade papers.

You get a lot of data through this online platform. You can see how many thousands or even millions of students provided the same wrong answer. Then build in a question or video to break them of that misconception. So it is easy to personalize the education. There is a lot more data you can get from this and we can use it to personalize education as much as we can. If students need to review content they can without holding the class up and if they need an extra challenge they can easily do so. She talks about this platform really pushes the delivery of the content to be as tailored or personalized to the individual as possible. We need to try and achieve this so everyone can succeed and learn.

This type of online course she talks about is the type of online courses students should be taking. These are rich with high level assignments and feedback. Students can interact and talk to each other on platforms. It is also carefully designed by the instructor to guide them through the content which the student can take at a pace that works for them. Too many online courses just give students multiple choice questions and not any meaningful interaction with the content. They make it as easy and basic as possible where the courses they talk about require higher level thinking and meaningful interaction with the content.

However what she does not address in this talk is peoples access to computers and technology. Not everyone has access or money to these devices. Although I guess she is focusing on one problem at a time. Some people may have the technology, but not access to fast internet. Also the problem is that not everyone country has an open internet policy. If those videos used on the platform connect to youtube then people in China can not access them for example. I could see a lot of potential access problems if someone wanted to take this class online from China. I depend on my VPN to get to this site as well as many other blocked sites in China.

So I think we have still things to fix and change. However I really like this model for online education that she talked about and hope other online programs can follow this model. I want online programs to follow this model both at the high school level and college level. Just because it is an online class should not make it easy or simple.

If you want to learn more or want to know what to start thinking about how these types of online education classes will change college I suggest you read this article or this article.