"Our eyes are not on the ball," said Moses. "If we're really serious about child safety, it's not about what's going on online; it's what's going on in their immediate physical environment. Five thousand kids get sent to the hospital every year for scissor injuries, but how many schools have scissors in them? We need to teach kids how to use things safely. You can run a band saw in middle school,but you can't go on the Internet."
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ASCD Inservice: Would Your Admins Embrace MySpace? - 0 views
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Finally, the big question from this session: "Do you want to be a barrier to kids learning, or do you want to work with the learning they're already doing?"
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We recently received an email from our superintendent all social networking sites and many other internet sites would be blocked. We are unable to view videos on our computers. My students are unable to play many games on the internet that are educational because of this. We have training in our school on how to teach our students to be safe but we never actually get to show how to use these social networks properly.
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I'm an administrator at a large high school in an organization that content filters almost everything of potential value. (it's ironic that our students cannot access iTunes U to get Chemistry lectures from UC Berkeley in the classroom but they can access ebay and a Las Vegas gambling rewards page. I wonder if there would be to much of an outcry among the office weasels if those sites were blocked as well) One of the things that I am observing outside the school is how many of our teachers (as well as students) are using Facebook. I was actually able to set up a training during Spring Break using Facebook as a back-channel communications tool when our teachers were scattered all over the country. Why are we asking students (and staff) to step back into the previous century when they arrive at the schoolhouse door?
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One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views
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quietly tell select students about the policy
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“We’re going to invite 20 seniors [this school year] selected by teachers,” he says. We don’t want the computers to be a distraction.”
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In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.
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The Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois, has taken a step in this direction by allowing students to bring their computers to school and connect to the Internet, but not log on to the district’s network, says Darrell Walery, director of technology.Stay Away from My Networkwalery sums up the struggle in this issue succinctly. He says tech directors who have been teachers favor the experiment, while those who have business backgrounds blanche at the thought. “My role as technology director is to mediate this exact issue,” he adds.
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Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.
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Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.
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The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.
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“Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”
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“There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says, from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.
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Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”
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Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.
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While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.
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“The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”
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Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.
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Educational Leadership:Giving Students Ownership of Learning:Footprints in the Digital Age - 0 views
www.ascd.org/...prints_in_the_Digital_Age.aspx
web2.0 willrichardson pln digitalfootprint socialnetworking Glastonbury
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This 10-year-old probably still needs to learn many of these things, and she needs the guidance of teachers and adults who know them in their own practice.
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We must help them learn how to identify their passions; build connections to others who share those passions; and communicate, collaborate, and work collectively with these networks. And we must do this not simply as a unit built around "Information and Web Literacy." Instead, we must make these new ways of collaborating and connecting a transparent part of the way we deliver curriculum from kindergarten to graduation.
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Younger students need to see their teachers engaging experts in synchronous or asynchronous online conversations about content, and they need to begin to practice intelligently and appropriately sharing work with global audiences. Middle school students should be engaged in the process of cooperating and collaborating with others outside the classroom around their shared passions, just as they have seen their teachers do. And older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online.
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we educators must first own these technologies and be able to take advantage of these networked learning spaces. In this way, we can fully prepare students not just to be Googled well, but to be findable in good ways by people who share their passions for learning and who may well end up being lifelong teachers, mentors, or friends.
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So what literacies must we educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? It starts, as author Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, with an understanding of how transparency fosters connections and with a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks;
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In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.
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This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go. In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.
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A Colorado Conversation » Administrators - 0 views
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Essential Questions Capture Everything: What's worth capturing in my classrooms? My building? My district? Audio? Video? Text-based assignments? Student work? Writing? Share Everything: Where can I share it? With whom? What audiences is our organization working to serve? How will they benefit from these shared items? Who needs to see what’s going on? Open Everything: What are the closed silos of information in our schools that shouldn't be? What things outside of our schools have we closed (blocked)? What can we do to open both of those up? Only Connect: How can I help my students and teachers connect with content, with each other, and with others outside the classroom (students, teachers, experts, mentors, the community, etc.) in a meaningful way? What questions do I have for my administrators/curriculum staff? Teaching Staff? IT Staff? Students?
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Essential Questions What literacies must educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? What’s one thing you are going to do in the next six weeks to help you begin to master these literacies? How does "authentic" assessment change when the student's audience is the world?
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Use the Power of Twitter to Build Your Personal Learning Network « I Teach Ag... - 0 views
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Professional Learning Community (PLC), the idea of the PLC is the entire staff would have the same goals and expectations for the school, students and learning on campus. For myself, the idea of a PLN is the building block to a better PLC. Everyone is their own individual with their own ideas and backgrounds, meaning everyone will have their own PLN (that’s why it’s a “personal” learning network). If every teacher can bring their own PLN, we make a larger, more experienced PLC.
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What is educhat? It is a way that anyone interested in educational technology can come together and talk through Twitter. Everyone involved in the discussion uses the hash tag #educhat. A hash tag allows you to follow the discussion of all the individuals, whether or not you are officially “following” them
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2¢ Worth » Predictions Questions about the Next Decade - 0 views
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Are we (teachers) going to become digital users or subscribers? For decades we have been comfortable using packaged instructional content (textbooks, etc.) to help students learn, and this was probably necessary in closed learning environments.
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What’s to come of social networking? Will we, as a larger defining education community, come to accept social learning techniques and integrate them, or will we continue to fear and block these opportunities?
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Just how much influence might I have, as a teacher, on the learning that my students are engaged in outside of my classroom and outside of the school’s bell schedule? How might emerging ICTs enable more interesting and potent learning experiences beyond the confines of traditional schooling? How responsible am I to pursue these opportunities or do I continue to follow the traditional role of teacher and leave tech and the networks to the “natives?”
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Students as 'Free Agent Learners' : April 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views
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Among the findings: There's a trend toward students using technology to take hold of their own educational destinies and act as "free agent learners."
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The survey this year polled more than 281,000 students, 29,000 teachers, 21,000 parents, and 3,100 administrators and involved 4,379 schools from 868 districts in all 50 states.
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students see significant obstacles to using technology in schools. They reported that school networks block sites that they need to access, that teachers specifically limit their use of technology, and that there are "too many rules," preventing students from using their own devices, accessing their communications tools, and even limiting their use of the technologies that the school provides.
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students and teachers were asked which technologies they would include in the "ultimate school." More than twice as many students as teachers chose online classes; more than twice as many students as teachers chose gaming; nearly three times as many students chose Internet access; and three times as many students chose mobile devices.
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Lessons Learned: Webcasting and Live Blogging a School Board Meeting » Moving... - 0 views
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In many ways, digital technologies can be used as humanizing and socializing influences in a community. One of the virtual attendees (Ernie Cox) tonight commented, “as a father of 2 small children I could be even more involved in civic life if more meetings where covered like this…..” Ernie is exactly right. Webcasting and recording events like this can open up many more doors for civic engagement and involvement. School
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veryone who wanted to get into the room tonight could not fit. How many more Edmond residents and school district constituents could “attend” the meeting if it was both webcast live and archived? Many, many more.
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If we want to help motivate and direct our students to become meaningfully engaged in the civic activities of their community, state, and nation (and I think this is an important goal) we should advance this purpose by encouraging them to become citizen journalists.
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The benefit of using a tool like CoverItLive (which was free, incidentally) was the opportunity to engage in a backchannel discussion with others during the meeting. This would not have been possible if we were simply viewing the board meeting on the TV. I could even envison the school board making time for virtual attendee/participant comments and questions.
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This can and should be a context where the transparency afforded by social media tools produces numerous ancillary benefits for those involved, besides the simple act of documenting and sharing an event.
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Our school board should go paperless. It was AMAZING to see how thick the binders of paper were which each school board member had in front of them during the meeting. In our digital world, it would be both prudent and useful to have all those documents digitized so they were full-text searchable.
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the district blocks all videos and photos from the learning community so they are inaccessible by students as well as educators on the district network.
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No one can predict with complete accuracy what the information and communications landscape is going to look like in 2015. How is this dynamic environment addressed in the site plans of our schools? I’m curious if these site plans will be made available electronically for parents to download and read. I think they should be.