by Meredith Raymer
It’s a Wednesday night, I sit in my bedroom and have just completed my homework after a surprisingly light-load. I pull out my phone and realizing I have plenty of time to burn decide to spend my time checking Facebook. When I open the app, all I see is my older family member’s posts from the latest game they’ve become attached to and spams from friends who haven’t checked their account in months. I keep trying to delete the useless posts from my timeline but instead am taken to play the game. Frustrated and wishing I could get on an actual computer to clean my timeline I glance at my netbook, then quickly remember all social media is blocked. I give up and wait for the next time a blocked website ruins my internet enjoyment. Since our time outside of schools is ours to use we should be able to access any site we want when we are not on campus.
It may seem as though having the freedom of the internet would cause students to not complete their homework and maybe in the short term that is true. However, learning how to cope with these distraction will better prepare them for their lives in college and in a career. In college, most of us will have our own computers without blocking systems and if we don’t learn to ignore distractions now, how will we be able to ignore them in the future? With the continuing evolution of technology, these distractions won’t disappear anytime soon. Balancing free time with homework time is difficult but, coping with distractions, especially on our computers, will also prepare us by teaching time management.
Another concern is the increased freedom to access to social media leading to an increase of cyberbullying. But since this would happen on the school’s devices, the school administrators could take action against these behaviors. Knowing there are punishments for participating in cyberbullying on the school’s netbooks will persuade students not to take part. These punishments could include SBRs, but also the offender’s off-campus netbook freedom could be revoked. In the long term, the ability to crack down on cyberbullying could solve the issue completely.
While it may seem that the freedom to use our netbooks as we wish at home would cause more issues like incomplete homework and cyberbullying, these are only temporary. To get over this learning curve, administrators can revoke students’ home netbook privileges by blocking unapproved sites at all times if they do not turn in their homework often and their grades slip or if they repeatedly cyberbully other students. In the long term, the benefit of allowing students free internet access at home outweighs the short-term growing pains.
Students will learn better time management skills to prepare them for college and the repercussions of cyberbullying will dissuade students from doing such. But, there are also short term benefits. When I type a phrase into a search engine for a project, often the link that seems to give the most helpful information is blocked. If we can access more information for school projects, the quality of them will improve. Also, if students know they can access their preferred social media site easily at home, they will resist using their phones to access these sites during school. Since there are such valuable short and long term benefits to freeing the netbooks and rules can be set in place to govern inappropriate usage, netbooks should be blocked only during school and not while students are off campus.
