Article Review

I visited several blogs on the Top 100 Educational Blogs, and many were interesting reads, but the one I'd like to comment on is #3 Mindshift. I read the post from May 24, 2013, called Teaching Respect and Responsibility: Even to Digital Natives. This article discussed the idea of teaching students who are so technology savvy to be respectful and responsible users. It discusses the responsibility of parents and teachers to teach the students what appropriate and safe behavior with technology is, and to enforce that it is used that way. As the article states, the students need ethical guidance and the security of rules and guidelines for usage. It also encourages teaching the difference between private and public technology. What is shared outside of school is completely different than what is shared at school.

The article also says that parents who allow technology use at home, and educators who use technology with students must be aware that mistakes are going to happen. Rather than disciplining for those mistakes, we must teach how to correct them. Only if the mistakes are habitual, do we use consequences. That being said, there must be a similar code of ethics between home and school so that students do not have such difficulty determining what is acceptable in each place.

I found this to be a very insightful article. It is an issue I worry about as we get closer to having more technology in our students hands. Some students are not trustworthy with technology, but perhaps it's because they haven't been taught how to be.

I neglected to include the link to this article before, so here it is...
Teaching Respect and Responsibility: Even to Digital Natives