Blog 8

I believe that because the Internet is such a huge and important part of many people’s daily lives, it is critical for teachers to instruct their students on how to properly use it. The Internet is like many things; it can be easily abused and used for the wrong reasons, or it can be used in ways that enhance a person’s daily life or used in ways that expand a person’s knowledge base. However, I think that even with proper instruction, there will always be students who find it funny and wish to abuse the Internet and access websites and other places on the web that are inappropriate. For this reason, it is also important for technicians at schools to block adult content and other dangerous and inappropriate websites that students do not to be accessing. It is also possible that a student may be researching for a paper and accidentally stumbles upon a website that he/she did not wish to view. It is important to protect today’s students from the dangers that are out there on the web.

Furthermore, nowadays, pirating illegal content off the Internet is a huge problem. Many people do it, because it is easy, quick, and free. However, as an educator, I think it is also important to raise awareness that downloading content such as movies, music and books, for example, from the Internet without paying for it is very much like stealing from a store. Not only should they know that it is unethical, but it also has repercussions for the creators of the content that the students are downloading; in a way, music artists and actors lose money every day and are cheated out of money, because their hard work is available for free to everyone in just a few clicks on the Internet. In addition, I believe this kind of behavior goes hand in hand with plagiarism. Students need to be made aware that it is unethical to steal written content or any type of content on the Internet (or any other place) and claim that it is their own.

Lastly, it is also important to teach students how to search properly for material on the Internet. As we went over before in this course, not all material and information on the Internet is valid. Students must be made aware of this and taught to be skeptical of the web pages they run across online. They should be taught what to look for on a website to make sure it is valid and reliable.