Cyberbullying IS a BIG deal

It is a scary thing to think your child is being bullied without your knowledge but unfortunatly it could be happening. So parents, instead of trying to think it couldn't be happening to your child step up and ask your children what are they really doing behind their screens, and stop cyber bullying. 

According to Wikipedia the definition of cyber bullying is the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behavior by an individual or group that is intended to harm others.  Cyber bullying is not something we should take lightly according to netsmartz.org about one third of teens get bullied online and girls are a lot more likely to be bullied than guys.

In high school I knew a peer that was cyber bullied for months and she never told anyone until she thought her life was at stake.  There was a boy that was Facebook messaging her every day saying how ugly she was and would never amount to anything because she was too poor to afford college.  Also this bully threaten that if she were to ever tell anyone that he was bullying her he would personally come to school and beat her up.  She kept it secret for months and all of her friends could tell something was going on and it took one friend to really care about her to find out the truth.  Apparently this "dude" that was bullying her ended up to be a girl at our school who was jealous because this girl had "stole" her boyfriend.  When things started to leak out about the bullying the bully made one last threat that if she was to show up to school she would be beaten so badly that her boyfriend would never want to talk to her again.  Of course the school stepped in the bully was expelled from school and dealt with in the proper way.  However for the peer that had been bullied it took her awhile to really adjust to the fact no one was after her anymore, her friends said that it took her a solid month to really get  back to normal.

This is why cyber bulling is so important because just because the bullying has stop does not mean the person being bullied has recovered.  As parents we need to make sure that we truly know what is going on behind that screen.  My peer's parents could have prevented this if they would have just checked up on her and made sure everything was okay. This website is a cute website for parents to get to, to help inform their children about cyber bulling. Parents can be one of the major impacts on stopping cyber bulling because they can step and make sure that their child is doing what they are suppose to be doing on the internet.  Too many time parents just let their child go on the internet and never once check up on them to see what they are really doing. 

My Past with Technology

Throughout my elementary, middle and high school years I have noticed a rise in technology in the classrooms. In elementary schools we had over head projectors and chalkboards.  Our overhead projectors were carried around on a cart and shared from room to room  As shown in the picture on the left this is what one of my elementary school's projectors would have looked liked. I remember the worse place to sit in class was right next to the overhead because there was a fan that would blow out hot air and it would get so hot that the students would either have to move or the teacher would shut it off and start writting on the chalkboard instead. Unfortunatly this was the only technology our school could offer so classes were usually boring and if you didn't sit in the right place usually hot. However the older I became the more technology advanced and started to create hands on technology for students.  
In middle school technology really started to sky rocket in the media and also in my classrooms.On this link for example is one of the technology tools students were allowed to use; these lap tops were placed on cart and teachers were allowed to check them out as needed. I remember the most interesting class periods were the ones that you would walk into the classroom and see the lap top cart sitting there.  The teachers always stressed to us how expensive the lap tops were and if we were to break one we would have to pay for it on our own.  Along with the lap tops a very selected few teachers had SmartBoards and just about every teacher started teaching with PowerPoints and doing activites through their computers.  Classes started to become more interesting and we as students were getting more involoved in the classroom.
Once in high school technology was in full swing.  Every one of my classrooms had a SmartBoard and every teacher used their SmartBoard and so did we as students.  As shown in the picture on the top right SmartBoards were fun to play with and really engaged all of us as learners.  Teachers really took advantage of the SmartBoards and it was fun as a student to be able to use them as well and it made a lot of my peers as well as myself want to participate and learn in class. At my high school however they really stressed internet safety and even made us sit through assemblies of how to use the internet. Even though they seemed boring at first they were informative and overall I think that my peers and I really liked them and learned things we would of never of thought of would have been dangerous.  With this experience I feel as a future educator that I have more of a background to inform my students which then in the long run will help them and me.
I believe that having technology in my classrooms really helped me pay attention and want to learn because I was allowed to interact with what I was being taught. In this article, they talk about how much having technology in your classroom could really benefit your students and help with other needs not just education.  I think that with technology growing rapidly that schools need to get on board with technology and really expose there students to all the great things that technology can do for them. In these upcoming years I feel as though every classroom in America is going to at least a SmartBoard and maybe not more.  There are way too many cool "technology tools" out there that would help benefit the students that it would be silly for a school not to invest in all the wonderful technology around them.  In conclusion, this video below really drives home the message of schools need to jump on the technology bandwagon, because "the times are changing."