There are many things that can change a person's mind: productive feedback, soul searching...suggestions from about 60 middle schools students. All of these were used to help modify the subject of my TechQuest. Initially, I wanted to create a TechQuest based on internet safety and cyberbullying. However, after thinking about it and talking to a good number of my students, I've decided to limit the project to looking at cyberbullying. I'd like the students to work in small groups (2-3 students) to research on the internet some key components to this problem. I believe that by having the students look at specific examples of cyberbullying through articles and video, researching state laws regarding cyberbullying, and looking at ways to prevent/deal with this will help the students become more aware of this problem.
Collaboration is the key to working in a group. To help form what they have learned into one cohesive project, my students will utilize a web 2.0 tool like Google Documents, Adobe Buzzword, or possibly Zoho to create their final project. This final project will be used to promote awareness to younger grades. The course this project will be introduced to will contain about 20 students. This will create an ideal situation, allowing these students to travel out to multiple grades and present their findings to younger groups of students. In doing this, the student will become the teacher. Cyberbully awareness will rise, and hopefully, many students will start to take action to prevent this problem from occurring.
Will you include something about training students who are bystanders? I was just talking about bullying in general today with some of my colleagues. The number of bullying cases as of late will lead to schools being required to have strict bullying policies. The tricky part is that these often do not look at the function of behavior and therefore, may not actually solve the bullying issue. We were then talking about how we need to train the bystanders to know what to do and take action when they see bullying taking place. I wonder how we can train "cyber-bystanders".
ReplyDeleteI originally was taking a more awareness-oriented approach to the project. However, utilizing a small segment on how to respond to this if you are a "bystander" would be a great addition. My overall goal if for the kids to develop a project that would display what they have learned. This would be a great way for the students to get the message out that if you know this happening, you DO have the ability to help stop it. Thanks for the help.
ReplyDeleteAre you going to integrate anything with the parents? I think a lot of disciplinary problems experienced in schools today are due to a lack of parental involvement or education in the matter. Perhaps you could have the entire class come together and create a project with Zoho that the students could view and instead of it being something that their teaching is telling the parents, it's something the students have researched and as a whole are showing the parents?
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