Growing Up Online Video log

• What's your opinion of the impact of the Internet on kids? - I think the internet is a grade resource to have if it is used properly. However, it can have some scary impacts on children. I want to teach history at the middle school level, and about a month ago I thought that a really cool idea if I was teaching now would be to have students use Twitter to tweet as a famous historical person, using accurate chronology. A couple of weeks ago my grandpa wanted me to set him up with a Twitter account. I did, and he was so excited to see that he almost instantly had three followers. I clicked to see who was following him, and they were all "sexy" girls with links to porn sites. Imagine if I was a teacher and my students had that happen to them! I think the ready availability of so much information can also cause kids to learn things they wouldn't have otherwise learned or, at the very least, learn things sooner than they would have learned them.
  
• As a future teacher, do you worry about it? As I said above, I worry about using the internet and having something go wrong. I worry that teaching kids about blogging will lead to an anonymous blog with hurtful things about classmates on it. I worry that an historical Twitter account will lead to porn spam. I worry that an assignment on Martin Luther King will lead a student to martinlutherking.org, a website run by the white nationalist group Stormfront.
  
• Do you have a personal Internet-related story to share? Thought I don't remember this, I've heard the story from my parents. When I was younger and we got our first computer I wanted fun games to play, so I typed in something to the effect of funforboys.com, which ended up being a porn site.