Playing and Staying Safe online

Cyberwellness - Weiqiang

What are your three top cyberwellness issues for your students?

My top three cyberwellness issues are:

Cyber bullying, Internet addiction and Copyright.

How would you define each of the three issues? Please provide an example of situations when your students might face the issues.

Cyber bullying talks about the issues when a child is been harassed, bullied, humiliated, threatened etc. It might caused psychology issues such as depression or in the event lead to cases of committing suicide when it gets into a life threatening situations.


Example:

An example would be in facebook when students see it as an outlet to openly comment or make fun of their friends. What might appeared to be a harmless remarks towards a certain individual's behavior or attitude might end up sparking off heated arguments and exchange of words. To make matter worst, they might retaliate with a series of harassment or humiliating one another through exchange of words as an act of revenge.


Internet addiction talks about the issues when one is immersed in the world of internet and as a result develop a compulsive behavior or disorder that affects his or her daily life.


Example:

An example would be an addiction to surfing pornography on the world wide web. The 'addicts' might formed inaccurate perception towards the opposite gender through prolonged exposure of pornography images and videos. The lack of knowledge in the subject area of sex might result in many other social issues such as abortion and premarital sex etc.


Copyrights talks about the issues of plagiarism, infringement laws etc. It is a dishonest act of using the works of another without permission.


Example:

An example would be in the area of studies when the students extract informations directly from a web source without acknowledging the source. This act of dishonesty results in the act of plagiarism.

Why are these three cyberwellness issues important for your students to be able to handle? Will they somehow affect their personal lives? Will they affect your lessons or classroom management? Will they have other impacts on your students?

These three cyberwellness issues are important as they can greatly affect how the child behavior and perform in their daily lives. Been young and immature, the way they perceived and learned are easily shaped in the wrong directions if no proper guidance is been provided. They might appear restless, preoccupied or uninterested during lessons. They might also express their frustrations in the form of violence causing the other classmates to live in fears thus depriving the them a safe environment to study.

Add your sources of information to share with your colleagues (URLs, books or articles).

http://ict.edumall.sg/cyberwellness/

http://www.wiredsafety.org/

Initial Concept of Cyberwellness