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quietly tell select students about the policy

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

Collaborative environments, cloud computing, and "smart" objects are among the technologies that a group of experts believes will have a profound impact on K-12 education within the next five years or sooner.

This is the first report we have developed with a focus on emerging technologies for elementary and secondary schools, and we hope that K-12 educators will use it as a resource for robust dialog and technology planning," said Larry Johnson, NMC's chief executive. "The technologies we identified have the power to transform teaching and learning both in the short and long term."

The six technologies detailed in the report are... - One year or less: collaborative environments and online communication tools - Two to three years: mobile devices and cloud computing - Four to five years: smart objects and the personal web

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."

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.

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.

"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."

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?"

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.

As always, our goal was to continue building a collaborative community, to develop connections among faculty at different grade levels, and to allow teachers to have time to network and share ideas.