Cyber Ethics Blog

   Today we learned about cyber ethics and cyber bullying. Cyber bullying and sexting have become a huge problem in today's society. There are a lot of stories on the news about people whose lives have been ruined by their involvement in these activities. We skimmed through different resources to help us as teachers and as members of society avoid these things.
   I think this is very important to go over especially as future teachers. This is something that more than likely one or more of our students will be involved in. I don't have a lot of personal experience with this myself so it was interesting to me to read accounts of cyber bullying. I'm thinking about sending some of the resource information to my siblings who have kids because I think it's easy for adults to think that this stuff doesn't really happen. It does. Cyber ethics is also an important aspect in any professional world. Whether it is a teacher or some other job a lot of work will be done over the internet and knowing the correct etiquette, or "netiquette" as one site called it, is valuable information.
    One of the questions raised in class today was how we, as teachers, can respond to these problems. I'm still a little unsure of where my place is being the teacher. We talked about a lot of things that teachers can do, but some of them didn't seem realistic. Still, I think it is beneficial to have a lesson on cyber bullying and sexting. I think it's important the kids realize that there are major consequences. I didn't realize that anyone involved in these activities faced such major problems with the law. Maybe knowing those things will deter some of the students from doing it. This is such a new problem that we, as a society, are still learning how to respond and what the necessary actions to take are. That puts teachers in a difficult position to teach them the right and wrongs of cyber ethics.