cyberbullyingO

Originally, harrassment in schools was seemed that boys will be boys and girls will be girls. This viewpoint changed when situations and outcomes worsened. The schools became involved and stepped in when harrassment began to take place. There were consequences for anyone who engaged in any top of hazing or bullying. The schools set up policies that directly addressed student to student harrassment and listed appropriate punishments. Now the schools had a legal duty to take care of harrassment issues.

Today,traditional bullying still exists, but now there is a new culprit, the computer and this has become the new way of harrassing peers by students. Cyberbullying is any kind of taunting over the internet that is done to create damage to a person, their character or their computer system. The biggest problem with cyberbullying is the ability for the perpetrator to remain unknown and the ability to send the comments to the masses. This creates chaos at school and even more people getting involved in the bullying and rumors even in the face to face contact.

The schools are having difficulty with this issue because most of it takes place off of school grounds and they only have the authority to stop the "speech" part of it. Schools don't just want to punish the offenders but also stop the problem, make the parents aware of what's going on. Thus schools want to give educational presentations on the dangers of cyberbullying to show kids what it can do to their peers.

Google my name

After googleing my name, I found several things out. Number one, is that there are other people, around my age, with the same name. This is odd because I have never known anyone with my same name. One of the girls seems like a great person who has volunteered and written papers about her experiences, while the other is more "flirtatious." Luckily, the more flirtatious one looks nothing like and so there will be no mistaking the two of us. I found myself on various websites including:
- http://www.spokesman.com/letters/writers/14674/
- http://www.modelmayhem.com
-http://www.ewu.edu/x50430.xml
-http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news/live/body.asp?ID=library%5Cgrad01%5Cgrads-ferris
-http://www.soccerbuzz.com/recruits/2001recruitsa.htm
-http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_20010208/ai_n9982960/
-http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=20021019&id=Y7cyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=i_IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6724,6873921
-http://lovelyhotties.tumblr.com/post/765416024/muscularbabes-rachel-lassman
-http://ww.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/555642/0

What I found was that a lot of the sites had to do with soccer. It kind of brought me back to my old soccer career days and made me think about how my life would have been different if I had only stayed with my original plan and stayed at Colorado College. It turns out that my head coach there, ended up being the head coach of the Women's National Team which means I would have had an aawesome opportunity to get to that level. But that's how the world works and you learn and move on from your mistakes as best you can.

The other thing I realized I came up for a lot was modeling pictures. I used to model quite a bit, long before I ever wanted to be a teacher. Unfortunately what I didn't know is that some of my pictures got stolen and put onto sites I didn't even know about. I would say for school purposes, some of the pictures might be deemed inappropriate...they are tasteful thought, not slutty. I was also a part of hometown hotties for Maxim magazine which is probably frowned upon. Unfortunately, I don't know how to get rid of those pictures.

I do feel that as teachers we have a status to uphold for sure. However, we all had lives before we got into teaching where we all experimented and had fun and have the pictures to prove it. It is a slippery slope when dealing with this because I feel that as teacher's we may be held to higher standards than other people. I'm not sure what the correct answer is. I would like everyone's thoughts. My parents think I should delete all my modeling sites which I can see their point for sure, but it's also something I like to do..... would love feedback, thanks.

Digital Reflection Assignment

The article Digital Natives was extremely interesting and a little intimidating. The reason I feel it is intimidating is because I think I fianlly realized that I am definately going to have to incorporate technology into my lesson. That scares me a little bit because I am definately not a Digital Native but rather a Digital Immigrant who is not particularily savvy with technology. According to the article, "Our students have changed rapidly. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." This is a very important statement because it only reaffirms that we have to change our educational system to accomodate the Digital Natives. As stated by the artile, "If Digital Immigrant educators really want to teach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change." Before reading this article, I felt that I could possibly get by with out incorporating a lot of technology and doing things the "old way." However, after reading the article I have realized this will never work. Growing up with technology has actually wired the student's brains differently then older generation's brains were wired. We were taught with a slower methodology whereas today's youth are taught a lightening fast pace with instant gratifiaction. The article states, "They [students] function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to "serious work." "They've been networked most or all of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic and "tell-test" instruction." This is important to know for any teacher. this means you will constantly have to be changing your teaching style within one lesson in order to keep students engaged and on task. Otherwise, they will get bored and disinterested. We, as teachers, must also incorporate projects into our lessons that involve using technology which the students will be familiar with. It will be very important in our teaching careers to accept help from our students and remain flexible and creative.

Introduction

Rachel Lassman. Biology High School. Elephant