As many of you have may have seen by now, there is a viral video that shows the relent­less bul­ly­ing of a 68-year old bus mon­i­tor by what appear to be mid­dle school stu­dents.  The stu­dents are ter­ri­bly cruel, and the video goes on for 10 min­utes.  At the time of writ­ing this post, the YouTube video has been seen by over 7 mil­lion view­ers and increas­ing quickly.  The main­stream news media has also picked up on this story and it has gen­er­ated con­ver­sa­tions about the nature of youth in our coun­try. It cer­tainly seems that when some­thing awful like this hap­pens, we (espe­cially the media) dwell on the neg­a­tive.  Our soci­ety seems to suf­fer from the “The Sky is Falling!” syn­drome as can be evi­denced by one com­ment under the video.

Every time I watch this video, my faith in the future gen­er­a­tion wilts away slowly. So these are the future lead­ers? I may as well say good­bye now.

As awful as the expe­ri­ence that appears in this video, the pos­i­tive response online has been over­whelm­ing.  The “Lets Give Karen — The bus mon­i­tor — H Klein A Vaca­tion!” web­site was cre­ated in an effort to raise $5,000 to send Karen on a vaca­tion.  Cur­rently, the site has raised  nearly $650,000 from over 26,000 donors. No, those num­bers were not typos!

So what does this have to do with tech­nol­ogy in education?

“The Sky is Falling!” com­plex I men­tioned above seems to be extremely preva­lent when in comes to tech­nol­ogy in edu­ca­tion.  We, and espe­cially the media, seem to con­stantly focus on all the neg­a­tive things hap­pen­ing with tech­nol­ogy.  Schools block YouTube because of videos like this.  Face­book is seen as evil at many schools because of the harass­ing that may occur, or because of inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ships between stu­dents and teach­ers.  Social media in gen­eral is con­sid­ered a very dan­ger­ous place for students.

We often don’t con­sider the pos­i­tive things hap­pen­ing with all of those tech­nolo­gies.  What about YouTube videos that have allowed stu­dents to cre­ate a global audi­ence? How about the teacher who dras­ti­cally increased com­mu­ni­ca­tion with stu­dents through a class Face­book page? I con­stantly find myself chal­leng­ing schools to help their stu­dents cre­ate a pos­i­tive dig­i­tal foot­print rather than teach­ing their stu­dents to be invis­i­ble online. Does your school oper­ate with a “The Sky is Falling!” men­tal­ity, or does it chal­lenge stu­dents to cre­ate a pos­i­tive dig­i­tal footprint?

Nick Sauers