Reflection on "Growing Up Online"

 Growing up online does a good job of this new generation coming of age with the internet.  For the first time, kids have access to an unlimited amount of information.  They are able to communicate in ways never thought of ten years ago and also finding new ways of expressing themselves.  With websites such as facebook, people are able to express themselves in ways that they are unable to express publicly.  Many adults today don’t understand this new desire to be online all the time and because of this misunderstanding, parents, teachers and other adults are viewing the internet as something corrupting the youth. 

There was one teacher in the documentary who taught high school English.  She felt that the internet was diminishing the quality of different pieces of literature she assigned, because students could escape the assignment by reading spark notes.  When I saw this teacher, I was a little upset by her methods of teaching.  I admit to using spark notes as a way of completing an assignment.  The only reason I decided to use spark notes was because I thought the text was boring and a waste of my time to read.  I remember when I was in high school and a teacher assigned a book for the class, it needed to be interesting or else I didn’t read it.  The teacher seemed to be relying on old methods to teach a new generation of students.  I feel if the teacher incorporated spark notes into her lessons in addition to reading the literature she would have been more effective at teaching.  If I were in her shoes, I would go to spark notes as an overview to the book that we are going to read.  She could create her own Facebook group and have students post their feelings of the assigned reading.  Students could post their questions so you know what needs to be reviewed in the classroom and what the students learned from the assignment. 

                This video opens your eyes to many different possibilities that can go wrong on the internet.  Girls are using the internet as a “how to” guide for anorexia.  Bullying has been refined to be invisible to adults by taking place online instead of inside schools.  Rumors can now be spread instantly through Facebook, Myspace or even Youtube.  The documentary compared the internet to historical westward expansion.  Adults are finding themselves in unknown territory and there is no one regulating what is going on online.  This documentary shows how it is even more important to use technology in the classrooms to create some guidelines for the internet.

                It is my job as a future teacher to embrace technology rather than trying to push it out of student’s lives.  If internet is pushed out of schools, students are just going to use the internet in more shocking ways at home on their own time.

***If you would like to watch the video for yourself visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/