Tools for Teaching Cyber Ethics

Star, L. (2003). Tools for Teaching Cyber Ethics. Retrieved from http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech055.shtml

With our society and our classrooms becoming increasingly tech savvy, and no visible police force watching over our shoulders, cyber ethics is becoming an increasingly important issue. This article discusses cyber ethics and how to integrate the concept into your classroom. The internet is a source of endless information, and some of the information students absorb are things like how to download a cracked program, how to download mp3s, how to quickly find images or research materials from Google. But they need to be taught how to ethically use those things. This article has many suggestions, like drawing parallels between the internet and the real world. One way to do this is to post student work on a class website, and ask the students how they would feel about someone else using their work without asking. Suddenly it's their hard hours of research online, not a faceless website with tons of facts that they can copy and paste from. It makes the issue more personal. Some other suggestions they had included posting a written acceptable use policy in the classroom, or teaching students about the consequences of downloading and unknown file and potentially spreading a virus to the entire network. One of their biggest points was to not ban the internet, as it would do more harm than good. The internet stores a wealth of information, and integrating technology and the internet responsibly can lower student boredom and raise student understanding.

I thought this article made some very important points. As a future teacher, I thought one of the most pertinent things was to set a good example. As teachers we should make sure our students see us practicing cyber ethics. This includes things like citing our online sources, and not using sources that are copyrighted. Also, whenever an assignment involves the internet, we need to make it clear to students that if they break copyright law and we find out about it there will be consequences. I thought this was a very good article, and I'm interested in reading more in depth about the subject later.