11th January 2016

The Internet in Education

From the five potential problems listed on pp 234-236 in Roblyer, which may have the most impact on your classroom and students and why?  How will you address these concerns in your lesson planning in your assignment and in the future? 

Another issue related to internet use - particularly in schools - is the restricted nature of internet access.  We have seen why this would be considered necessary, but it also stifles the ability of both teachers and students to access the resources they need.  What are you able to access at your school or intitution - or not?  Does this work?  What does this mean for an educational institution where many students have internet capable smart phones?  Does this mean restrictions should be relaxed and better supervision should be utilised? 

Roblyer & Doering (2014) list the following 5 common Internet problems:

1.  Accessing sites with appropriate materials
2.  Safety and privacy issues
3.  Fraud on the Internet
4.  Viruses and hacking
5.  Copyright and plagiarism   (pp. 234-236)

Number 5 copyright and plagiarism has the most impact on students in my section (adult English language learners), particularly in Cert III English for Further Study and Cert IV English for Academic Purposes courses where students are required to write academic essays.  There is a cultural aspect to this as it seems that in some cultures plagiarism and breaching copyright laws is more acceptable than it is in Australia.  We have had students with post-graduate degrees from other countries blatantly plagiarsing the work of others in academic essays, sometimes even copying and pasting text from an Internet site (word for word) and passing if off as their own.  We have developed a unit of work in each of these courses explaining exactly what plagiarism is and how to reference correctly in the Harvard style.  To say we enforce and reinforce this is an understatement!  As most of these students plan to enter university in Australia it is essential that they learn this.  Most seem to be quite savvy about the other 4 issues, however students often express their concerns over their children accessing inappropriate material on the Internet so we introduce them to filtering software such as Net Nanny to use at home (I installed this on my son's laptop when he was about 15 - he wasn't happy about it but it was effective).

Up until about 2 years ago all social networking sites and Youtube were blocked in my institution (TAFE).  However it became apparent that social network sites such as Facebook are the way most students receive and send information as well as communicate with each other.  It was also realised what a valuable teaching tool Youtube is, so these sites were "unblocked", TAFE now advertises its courses on Facebook and each Institute has its own Facebook page which students are invited to join.  There are still blocks on certain sites, I don't know what the criteria is but the firewall kicks in at odd times. for example the Oz Lotteries site, however we are now able to access the majority of websites that we need to.  Of course there is the issue of students connecting to social media to chat to their friends on their smart devices during lesson time,  this is another classroom management issue for teachers to deal with.