Folks,

Please don’t be shocked when you find out during my Internet Safety class that all or most of your students have personal Facebook accounts.

Your class is not alone.

We want to foster conversation about how to stay safe online.  Admonishing your students that they must be 14 to have a Facebook account simply stops the conversation.  We need to have an open dialog about how to stay safe online.

Telling them not to use Facebook or Twitter simply doesn’t work.  Pointing out they lied to get an account doesn’t help during the lesson.  It’s something to point out later.

Over the past five years I’ve asked classes at all our grade levels what they do online.

There has been a general progression down through the grade levels of social media use.

Five years ago, the numbers looked like this:

5th Grade:  90%+ used Facebook or other social media

4th Grade:  40% used Facebook or other social media

3rd Grade:  One or Two students per class had myspace or facebook.

Last year:

5th & 4th Grade:  90%

3rd Grade:  55%

2nd Grade:  One or Two students per class

This year, preliminary results find nearly 45% of 2nd graders have personal Facebook accounts.  I’m doing my first 3rd Grade class this afternoon, but if the progression holds they should be above 90%.

We need to make sure teachers don’t react negatively.  When students feel they are doing something wrong, they won’t talk about it or get the help they need.

Thanks,

If you were a heavy bundles user, you are a bit nailed. They deleted all bundles and started “stacks.”

Here’s a video about stacks.

Stacks makes sharing bookmarks with your class more visual.

Otherwise, your links are all still intact.
There are other enhancements to the look and feel. Creating an account is easier.
It’s nice the site was picked up with folks with deep pockets and a vision of what to do with social bookmarking.

This was at the bottom of a story in the Washington Post:

Both legal language to protect the copyright owner from redistribution, along with a dozen one-click ways to redistribute.

Cisco two years ago made a big splash by buying the maker of the Flip, the perfect-for-the-YouTube-age video camera that was then a tech geek accessory of choice. Now, Cisco is killing off the Flip.

Today, the company announced it will “exit aspects of its consumer businesses,” including shutting down Flip.

Terracetimes.com started a number of weeks ago. Posts are generated by students, mostly without being assigned. In the lower grades, teachers are pulling together class projects on the curriculum in VoiceThread, MovieMaker, PhotoStory and posting them.

Are their ideas we could take away from this video which could be implemented in an elementary setting?

Click Below to Watch:

Dear All (This impacts you):

The Department Of Information Technology sent me an email at noon today with the following information:

“Deployment of Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) will begin on April 5, 2011 and run through April 22, 2011.”

This means starting today, your computer might act funny when you turn it on over the next few weeks. Don’t worry, it’s not a virus from some sinister outside source. It’s more like a virus from somebody you know.

During the first week, you’ll get an “optional advertisement” that IE8 is available. My advice is, go ahead and download it.

The second week, any computer that doesn’t have EI8 will have it automatically loaded when the computer is turned on. I think they should call that the “optional is optional” plan. You can stop it during the second week by pushing the “restart now” button while it is automatically downloading.

On the third week the “restart now” button goes away. Much like every radio tuner had to be licensed by the Soviet Regime, all computers which are turned on will have EI8 downloaded on them immediately, like it or not, no options to stop it.

So my advice is go ahead and download it when it is “offered,” optionally, the first week. At least then you’ll have the illusion you have freedom of choice.

Thanks,

(I truly hope I’m wrong about this.)

There’s been a lot of vitriol about Yahoo’s decision to deprecate Delicious.  We teachers use it to share links with classrooms or schools or online networks full of people.  It’s great.

Yahoo has put out a release saying they are “actively looking for a buyer” for Delicious.  Here’s why they won’t find what they seek.

Delicious is a huge compilation of links, ordered by value by crowd sourcing.  It takes very little financial backing to maintain, because there is no algorithm, no heavy technology.  The power is provided by the community.  One can go there, search for almost anything, and get very good results on a search, because only the best stuff has been put in there.

On the other hand …

Yahoo’s search depends on a huge infrastructure, constantly tweaking the technology, and monetizing by selling ranking in search results as well as (they hope) start charging subscription fees, the holy grail for online endeavors. (I mean, if netflix can get $6.90 a month, why can’t google/yahoo search?)

Here’s the thing.  If Yahoo sells Delicious, they will create a competitor that will hamper their ability to grow their core business.  Will Delicious under new management out-pace Google and Yahoo search?  Probably not.  But if Delicious survives under new management, it will be a competent alternative to a pay-for-search service which is the goal of Yahoo and Google search.

So the requirements for a buyer for Delicious would be:

1) Someone who has millions of dollars to spend

2) Someone with a business model that will never compete with Google and Yahoo search

3) Someone who will turn off the ability to search through all Delicious bookmarks

The catch is, if the new buyers of Delicious turn off the ability to search through all Delicious bookmarks, the potential revenue for the new buyer to charge for advertisements is diminished.  Getting a return on their investment on a multimillion dollar purchase will be all but impossible.

I certainly hope I’m wrong.

There is an elementary school student newspaper done by a friend of mine using wordpress.

It is still “early days” but the kids are taking to it.

I’m told some student editors were appointed in 4th grade yesterday.

By this morning, they were holding court in the school library, before school started.  Each had a table with a netbook and were having writing conferences with authors from their class as they edited their submitted work for publication.

No direction was given for this activity – it was organic.

Very cool stuff.

terracetimes.com

The security on it is flawless. No information is given to identify anything about the school – whatsoever. No school names, no student names, no county names, no state, no country. Very, very cool stuff indeed.

No walled garden here – just the safety of anonymity.

And the kids don’t seem to care. They know what they’ve written, and their friends and families know too.

I’ve written about the perils of web filtering just 15 days ago: http://clairvoy.com/2011/02/09/the-best-use-of-web-filtering-system/ and it looks like the man has caught up with me.

God forbid if teachers want to get together and discuss how they can better their practice.

Who the hell is making these decisions?  What goes in and what stays free?  Not a thinking person, we know that much.

1. Know your intentions.
Doug Firebaugh of SocialMediaBlogster.com has identified seven psychological needs we may be looking to meet when we log on: acknowledgment, attention, approval, appreciation, acclaim, assurance, and inclusion. Before you post, ask yourself: Am I looking to be seen or validated? Is there something more constructive I could do to meet that need?

2. Be your authentic self.
In the age of personal branding, most of us have a persona we’d like to develop or maintain. Ego-driven tweets focus on an agenda; authenticity communicates from the heart. Talk about the things that really matter to you. If you need advice or support, ask for it. It’s easier to be present when you’re being true to yourself.

3. If you propose to tweet, always ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
Sometimes we post thoughts without considering how they might impact our entire audience. It’s easy to forget how many friends are reading. Two hundred people make a crowd in person, but online that number can seem insignificant. Before you share, ask yourself: is there anyone this might harm?

4. Offer random tweets of kindness.
Every now and then I ask on Twitter, “Is there anything I can do to help or support you today?” It’s a simple way to use social media to give without expectations of anything in return. By reaching out to help a stranger, you create the possibility of connecting personally with followers you may have otherwise known only peripherally.

5. Experience now, share later.
It’s common to snap a picture with your phone and upload it to Facebook or email it to a friend. This overlaps the experience of being in a moment and sharing it. It also minimizes intimacy, since your entire audience joins your date or gathering in real time. Just as we aim to reduce our internal monologues to be present, we can do the same with our digital narration.

6. Be active, not reactive.
You may receive email updates whenever there is activity on one of your social media accounts, or you might have your cell phone set to give you these types of alerts. This forces you to decide many times throughout the day whether you want or need to respond. Another approach is to choose when to join the conversation, and to use your offline time to decide what value you have to offer.

7. Respond with your full attention.
People often share links without actually reading them, or comment on posts after only scanning them. If the greatest gift we can give someone is our attention, then social media allows us to be endlessly generous. We may not be able to reply to everyone, but responding thoughtfully when we can makes a difference.

8. Use mobile social media sparingly.
In 2009, Pew Research found that 43 percent of cell phone users access the Web on their devices several times a day. It’s what former Microsoft employee Linda Stone refers to as continuous partial attention—when you frequently sign on to be sure you don’t miss out anything. If you choose to limit your cell phone access, you may miss out online, but you won’t miss what’s in front of you.

9. Practice letting go.
It may feel unkind to disregard certain updates or tweets, but we need downtime to be kind to ourselves. Give yourself permission to let yesterday’s stream go. This way you won’t need to “catch up” on updates that have passed but instead can be part of today’s conversation.

10. Enjoy social media!
These are merely suggestions to feel present and purposeful when utilizing social media, but they aren’t hard-and-fast rules. Follow your own instincts and have fun with it. If you’re mindful when you’re disconnected from technology, you have all the tools you need to be mindful when you go online.

This list was compiled by Lori Deschene, the founder of @TinyBuddha on Twitter and tinybuddha.com, a multi-author blog that features wisdom and stories from people all over the world.

We have a school system county-wide web filtering system.  It blocks most useful sites, anything to do with social networking or collaboration, good sites for professional development, great sources of copyright free photos, and some of the porn.

Hitler burned books in large open piles with the media watching.  Web filtering is more like Argentina under Pinochet when people were “disappeared.”  One day a resource is available on the web, and under the dictatorship of web filtering, the next day that resource just doesn’t show up for work.  An error shows up which ominously makes you feel shameful and dirty — like you’ve been caught with cigarettes or a girlie magazine. “Don’t ask questions, they might notice.”

Of course this is happening more and more to websites like http://www.catchingreaders.com written by a 30+-year veteran reading teacher.  What do you do then?  Advocate, damn it, advocate.  Protest and appeal.  Work through the red tape and get those resources freed up.

See Picture Below (Unless You Haven’t Unblocked Flickr):

Best Use:

I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time unblocking sites one by one that we find useful.

The guys over in IT trust me, so they gave me web access to the filtering system (to look, not touch) and I found a gold mine.

I found the best use of a school-system wide Internet Filtering System.

I found the complete list of websites folks like me from around the county had taken the time to go through the arduous process, to get unblocked.

I can’t think of higher praise for a website.  To first be arbitrarily blocked.  Then be missed enough to have complaints lodged so that someone like me fills out forms in triplicate and has their boss sign off on it. To then have some guy in a small sunless room code for it to be unblocked.  Now that’s what I call pushing the “like” button.

Such a list of “unburnt books,” retrieved from the funeral pyre of editorial openness, is a list of wonder.  Real crowd sourcing.

And THAT, is the best use of a Web Filtering System.

I do wonder though,
about good resources on the web
which are blocked before we get to know them,
enough to miss them …

facebook is like jail.  You sit around, waste time, have a mugshot anyone can see,

write on walls and get poked by guys you don’t know.

The only thing Internet Explorer is good for, is downloading Firefox or Google Chrome.

And it’s not very good at that either.

LMS = Learning Management System = Blackboard

Thanks CogDogBlog.

(RePosted from May 2, 2009)

When I teach my K-5 students about Internet safety I break it all down to three guiding principles:

1) Keep  your private information secret. (Name, address, city, school, teacher’s name, age, mom’s name, sister’s name, swim club name, etc., etc.).  2) Never meet anyone in real life you only met online, and 3) Stop all incoming communication from “outsiders.”

With these three principles in place, students are about as safe as they are going to get on the Internet.

In K-5, Blackboard’s killer app, the reason d’etre, is it keeps the kids safe. By keeping them in a walled garden, it is argued, they won’t see anything bad and no big bad predator will find them.

Here’s the problem. A study of students conducted in 2007 found a majority of forth and fifth graders spend 3 to 6 hours a day on social media unsupervised at home.  They play with Myspace, Facebook and all the “sharp scissors” collaborative technology out there.  Heck even in 3rd grade there are early adopters in each class using MySpace and collaborating with folks they don’t know in their gaming sites. Webkins starts them off at an early age.  Yes, that’s right, Webkins targets kids with stuffed animals and with each animal they get a login for a social networking site.

So education is no longer the only game in town. In fact, students spend less time with technology in school than they do at home.  At home they are for the most part unstructured, because their parents don’t understand the technology.

Here’s the problem with the “Blackboard = Safe” thinking.  Blackboard forces students to do the things we should be training them not to do.  In Blackboard all student work is identified by their name or their student id number or both.  The whole thing that makes social media unsafe is children are giving away their personal information (name, address, phone number, when they are home alone) in the normal course of their chatter.  This must stop.  Using a system at school, however, which violates this prime safety directive is wrong.  We are modeling exactly what not to do.  Then they go home and do what they learned in school, but after school they are doing it on MySpace and Facebook.  Predators can’t get to our students if they don’t know who or where they are.

Here’s the problem with the “Blackboard = Won’t See Anything Bad” thinking.  In Blackboard, there are many ways to put links to sites on the web.  Everybody does it.  It’s part of learning.  To ignore the educational resources on the web would be pedagogical malfeasance. Blackboard is accessed with a web browser.  That means students are just two clicks away from porn, whether they are in Blackboard or not.  It’s the same level of security they would have navigating to sites from a classroom delicious site maintained by the teacher.  And sticking a single bookmark in delicious is a 2 second process, putting them in Blackboard is a 1 minute process and that’s if you are already logged into your Blackboard course.

So here’s the breakdown:

Blackboard costs a great deal of money, models bad behavior by forcing students to divulge private information in the course of their work and fails to be a more significant barrier to prevent children accidentally viewing porn. Oh, yeah, and did I say it costs a lot of money?

On the other hand, open source and free technologies like drupple, delicious and flickr can work with the same level of security and they are a lot easier to use.  I instruct teachers who are using these technologies to turn off all ability for “outsiders” to write anything.  Everybody can read it though. Coupling this type of implementation of open source and free collaborative technologies with the other two rules of Internet Safety and not only are students as safe as they would be in Blackboard, but we are modeling what they should do during the 5 hours they surf the net at home unsupervised.  Oh, yeah, and did I say it was free?

I was in the audience of a professional development session this week and the speaker brought up Blackboard and the audience of K-6 teachers booed.

Wow, Blackboard’s got to be in bad shape when a) you’re a technology that people so hate they would boo your name, and b) K-6 teachers (people who send children to the office if they call another student “fat”) are expressing themselves with such vitriol.

Vacuuming the scene with sweeping movements, or pans, doesn’t work well for the most part.

It is a problem as more and more students and teachers use flip cameras and other video production.

In general, this is a rule of thumb … for an example of the good, watch the video below:

Evan Hecox from Arkitip, Inc. on Vimeo.

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange

This can be said of any technology used for education …

The objective is not to teach our students how to use the technology.  It’s to teach them what, by using the technology, we all can learn about interacting with our world, our learning and our interpretation of things.

Tim Stahmer over at Assorted Stuff has a lot of bad things to say about Interactive White Boards (IWB) being “wastes of money and time.” Pointing to the teacher just using the IWB while students watch. I would agree in this instance there is a problem with the teachers, not the technology.

But there are many classrooms here in this Title One K-5 school outside Washington, D.C. where I teach, using IWBs well.

I’m a big believer in letting groups of kids work together using technology.

The killer app for IWB is the fact that groups of students can easily cooperate using a single GUI.

A video worth watching (you can skip the first 7:30 minutes and still get the point):

See Sugata Mitra’s explanation of his “Hole in the Wall” project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids.

In K-3, Interactive White Boards are a tool with which the whole class can do joint computing.

*1st graders using the edit function in MovieMaker to order the elements of a story and produce a video – together as a group of five. Some pushing the video around, some giving advice.

*K group of students building a photostory, for creating stories with a middle beginning and end. The group includes a special needs student who can interact using the computer running the smartboard and intellikeys – so they’re an equal in the process.

*1st graders Skyping as a class with another classroom and jointly doing voicethread.

Kids naturally work together and learn from one another. The tactile nature and large screen of IWB are ideal for fostering sharing of tech learning in the K-3 environment.

Tim is correct, there are many bad uses, but let’s not throw the babies (K-3) out with the bathwater (IWBs).

And perhaps, if teachers in middle school can look away from the worksheet model for just a moment, they might come up with some good uses too.

Principals are starting to ask their Information Technology Resource Teachers for a list of what children should know regarding technology at each grade.

My answer, “Well, it’s changing every six months. Children are learning this stuff at earlier and earlier ages. Two years ago, there were perhaps one or two 3rd graders who had created a MySpace page at home and three or four 4th graders who worked with online communities on gaming or other interests. Last year that type of skill set climbed into the double digits among 3rd and 4th graders. It is increasing exponentially in 4th and 5th grade and getting pushed down into 2nd and 3rd grade.”

I continued by saying, “I’m teaching them as fast as I can. Every year we are pushing what we teach down a grade level. Typing classes start in Kindergarten. So every six months such a list would change, because we are bringing our kiddos along so fast.”

I know, a bit of an ego, but it works at this school where everybody is a bit of a type-A …

Howard Rheingold brings us an expert.

Here Mimi Ito talks about her findings of interviews with hundreds of students on their use of technology in such a detached way. “Theoretical” and “academic” are words that come to mind.

Yet, we are doing much of the advanced stuff of which Ito talks here at this little K-5 Title One school outside Washington, D.C.. For the last two years we have had 5th graders creating webpages, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and using photosharing sites, producing video and audio media and embedding that media into their webpages.

Ito talks of a small minority of kids who “geek out” using media tools to fashion their own statements and expressions in an interactive way.

We just call it Social Studies.

The Challenge:
Our 4th and 5th grades (12 classrooms, 230+ some students and 17+ teachers and specialists) want to start a single school newspaper.  They are requesting an online work-flow allowing students to write but not publish, teachers to approve and publish.  The look and feel should be of a newspaper, not a blog.  They at first want to print the paper to distribute to students and families, rather than it being an online publication.

Draft Solution:
We can use the work flow process provided by the blogging software WordPress. Students would be given the role of “contributors” and 20 teachers and specialists “editors” or “administrators.” We could use a newspaper looking theme (14 different options can be perused here.) The newspaper could be viewed online or printed out and distributed.

To Publish Online or Not Online:
The 5th grade does a long-form research and publishing project each year which employs all sorts of social and publishing mediums such as blogs and wikis.

We have an Internet Security Protocol which has three components:

1)Don’t provide any personal details (name, school, county, state, country).
2)Don’t allow any incoming communication channels (no comments or text surveys) the only exception being radio button surveys.
3)And we tell students, “Never meet anyone in real life you only met online.”

Thus having students work in a “live” online environment is not a stretch.  Research two years ago found a majority of 4th grade students were actively publishing online (Facebook, MySpace) on their non-school time and equipment.

However, most of the teachers engaged in this project are viewing this as a traditional printed newspaper.  They seek to print the document and distribute a printed version.  This provides another layer of security because nothing will go out unless it is printed and copied multiple times.

Summary:
1)Blackboard is difficult to use and has none of the work-flow needed for this large-scale project.  Blackboard forces students to have their name or student id number on everything they publish (which in violation of our safety practices).  The blog and wiki elements of Blackboard are not viewable by families.

2)Wordpress is a solid solution from a work-flow standpoint and allows teacher and different groups of students to have different roles in the editorial process.

3)Installing WordPress inside the firewall will make it more secure in the short-term to make sure nothing is published without being scrutinized by a teacher.  It gives teachers, especially those with no blogging experience, more comfort to know nothing will go out that is not printed first.

4)However WordPress inside the firewall is not future proof.  It doesn’t allow for a change of heart which would allow for the paper to be published online.  This option of online publishing is one all real newspapers are now engaged.  The backup of data on an internally running installation of WordPress would be dodgy.

5)Wordpress outside the firewall has all the benefits of WordPress inside the firewall and allows for future proofing in several ways:

a)It allows students to access the newspaper’s editorial features from anywhere.

b)It allows the published items to be viewed by anyone anywhere.

c)It requires students adhere to online safety publishing guidelines listed above.  Students could use pen names and the school’s nickname could be used in lieu of the school name.  Everything else could be open.

We will be thinking on this over the next few weeks with the teams in question.

Here’s yet another brag on our school.   Our school is what Title One should be modeled upon. We are like a Charter Title One school in many ways, because we take the money the government provides for low income learners and run with it past what many are doing in schools in more well-to-do areas.

A Title One Heaven.

DateLine:  At a small school in Virginia …

A 1st grade teacher here at Title One Heaven shows her class Mo Willems books.  She participates in an internet interview of Mo Willems her class watches.

The students decide (with our Librarian) to write a pigeon book in the style of Mo Willems.

After writing it with the Librarian, the 1st Grade teacher creates a voicethread (inserted below) of the book written, illustrated and voiced by the students.

But then she goes one step further, and goes social. She sends the voicethread to Mo Willems website and it is posted.

That’s what I’m talking about!!! Reading, Writing, Art and Technology fueled by social media.

Title One Heaven.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020 is a post in Teach Paperless, a blog by Shelly Blake-Plock.  It’s a great blog about teaching.  I love how this guy thinks.

I’m reading this post in teachpaperless and I’m thinking, “Why write about it, just do it.” (I know, to share, to share …)

Here’s the list from Teachpaperless of 21 things that will be obsolete over the next 10 years, and what we (at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.) are doing about them today.

I’ve put the items teach paperless stated would be obsolete in bold.  I agree with all of them, save two (numbers 8 & 9).

The following is not bragging, I’m just stating the facts about the school at which I’m lucky enough to work:

1. Desks: A 5th grade teacher here removed all desks from her room two years ago.  She did a research project to track data on student performance.  She has not asked for the furniture back.

2. Language Labs: Hah! Forget ESOL, try finding an ETMT student (English as Their Mother Tongue).  This whole school is a language lab, and if the demographers are correct so will be most U.S. schools in the future.  We don’t have a separate language lab as a result.

3. Computers: The majority of our computers are laptops, and going forward we are trying the netbooks and the next step.  School-system finances and classroom real estate both being at a premium, small and mobile is where everything is going, not just computing.

4. Homework: We’re going 24/7 using Blackboard (2 & 3) in the lower grades and wordpress/blogspot & wikispaces in the upper grades (3, 4 & 5).  Students are doing work at home without being asked.  That’s the real power of social media.  A 5th grade teacher is currently doing educational research on best practices for homework, which is NOT the way it used to be done, more along the line of teachpaperless.

5. Standardized Tests: This is a hot topic, the details of which I will cover in an upcoming post.  But we are very much moving toward portfolios as a large percentage of our students (compared with other schools) do a portfolio replacement test for the standardized tests.

6. Differentiated Instruction as Unique: We’re already far beyond this and our teachers differentiate due to language, learning styles and/or special needs.  We have an inclusive model which requires real and meaningful differentiation as a fundamental baseline to everything happening in a classroom or other part of the school, rather than an afterthought or “something the special ed teacher do” (which unfortunately is what many teachers around the world think).

7. Fear of Wikipedia: We use it as a method to teach critical reading skills. And by “critical” we mean “with a discerning eye.”

*8. Paperbacks: Here is the one thing with which I don’t agree.  Radio was to be the end of newspapers, and radio theater the end of paperbacks.  Television was to be the end of Radio, and Computers the end of everything that came before.  People will consume information in a way that is most useful and although the percentage of market share changes we have a ways to go before books go the way of papyrus scrolls.

*9. Attendance Offices: Bio scans are great, but there will still be a frazzled office person handing out tardy slips and calling home to confirm children’s whereabouts.

10. Lockers: Well, didn’t need them anyway.

11. IT Departments: According to TeachPaperless, IT Departments will have more time to innovate as they give up control and budget-line to shared-open solutions.  A lovely sentiment, and clear-headed if one remembers fondly how there didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge of IT on the Star Ship Enterprise.  But the thought of the obsessive, slightly asburger-y engineers (the norm in most IT departments) being “innovative”, well, let’s not be silly now.

12. Centralized Institutions: He’s right on the mark.  He’s talking about school buildings being like a factory where students show up for a shift.  I would also include decentralizing central offices.  “Employees who do not spend at least 10 hours a week with student should be sacked,” is a budget solution suggested by one of the teachers at my school.  All “central office” types should be housed in schools. That way they might accidentally run into a student every now and then.  At our school we house central office types, and it helps them understand the school and students, and helps us by having them more accessible.

13. Organization of Educational Service by Grade: We’re already doing this by necessity, because when one successfully differentiates, it’s done.

14. Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology: I agree, but would reword this to say the following will be obsolete in two years, “Education School Classes that Can Successfully Continue to Keep Social Technology Out.” (I mean MiFi kind of screws up all the “firewall technology” on which we are currently spending money.)

15. Paid/Outsourced Professional Development: Our school has a specific model which is co-teaching, coaching and inclusive.  One can walk into any room at any time and nobody bats an eyelash.  The kids and teachers are used to constant traffic.  This raises the bar, because no one can go into their room, shut the door and come out in June.  Professional accountability which includes an AP coming in twice a year is ridiculous.  Constant feedback on everything at all times is what professional development is now and going forward.  Implementing it is the hard part.  We have.  There’s still a place for Paid/Outsourced PD, but the guts of our PD is inhouse PLC, and it works.

16. Current Curricular Norms: We’re doing this, but it is easier in a K-5 environment.  Differentiation demands it.

17. Parent-Teacher Conference Night: More and more classroom blogs are cropping up at my school. These keep the parents in the loop in an ongoing way.  One instance (not at this school) is an individual blog being used for a special needs student instead of a journal they take from home to school and back.  The dialog is deep and meaningful and discrete.  A reality to which I think Blake-Plock is alluding.

18.Typical Cafeteria Food: We’ve made no great inroads here, but one can only hope.

19. Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering: Here again is a tension between the creative flow in a school and the need of many DIT departments to assert control claiming “Internet Security” as the cover.  In the future, with social media becoming a utility, and technology becoming ubiquitous, “Internet Security” emanating from within a technology department as a firewall or other technology will not be possible.  “Internet Security” will principally be achieved through behavior management by education of students from Kindergarten forward.  Our 3rd and 4th graders are doing MySpace and Facebook pages at home already.  They are doing google pages, blogspot and wordpress at school.  Given the tools, they could do what Blake-Plock is suggesting next week, but current technology setup of our formal graphic design and webmastering prevents this.

20. High School Algebra I: OK, well, N/A for this K-5 school.

21. Paper: In the last three years, we have moved from a deskjet at every teacher’s desk to a small set of networked centralized printers.  Paper use (and toner) has declined exponentially.

Thanks to Blake-Plock and TeachPaperless.blogspot.com for everything they are doing to support the mission.

Internet Security

A good reminder about passwords is important from time to time:

1) Passwords should be six characters or longer.

2) Incorporate random capital letters, swaps letters for numbers (like vanity license plates) and includes a symbol or two. The password “password” (which you should not use) is much stronger as “r1Va’5paZZw8rD.”

3) Don’t use names of pets, children or streets. It’s better to use a phrase, song lyric or line from a poem as the base. “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad” could become “d9n’Tmak%6aad.” Base the password on the first letter of each word, turning the lyric into “HJ,dmi6.”

For more, read Microsoft’s advice.

For those of you with Macs, get 1password, it is a program that saves all your passwords and backs them up.  That way, you will never forget a password.

To make things easier, use the same username for everything.

And the security wonks aren’t going to like the next thing I’m going to say:  Here’s the main thing.  If what you are doing isn’t about money, use the same password for everything.  It’s not worth trying to remember.

But with 1password you don’t have to.  I use an independently generated 26 alfa-numeric  password for everything.  1password is a beautiful thing.

Mark

Thanks to those folks who sent in suggestions on improving this list. Your comments are welcome.

1) Mozilla Firefox is a “nondenominational” web browser.  Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer browser pushes users toward Microsoft products.  Apple’s Safari browser is very light on its use of computer resources, but also light on its features.  Mozilla Firefox is superior to both in that it does not push users toward specific products and is so feature rich, Microsoft is starting to fashion it’s browser IE after Firefox.

2) Delicious Social Bookmarking is the best way to manage website links.  This links to a page which explains social bookmarking, How to Social Bookmark.

3) Blogs are Internet resources which are great for publishing and managing student work.  This links to a page which explains blogs, What’s a Blog.

4) Wikis are Internet resources which allow multiple users to edit documents, make lists, and coordinate information.  This links to a page which explains wikis, What’s a Wiki.

5) Twitter is a “micro blogging” site. It is one of the best ways for teaching teams to maintain instant and ongoing communication throughout a busy day.  Twitter has the benefits of instant messaging, while maintaining a record of what is communicated so the information can be read whenever a team member has a free moment.  Here’s a short video explaining twitter.

6) Tagging is the new way of organizing digital items online.  Tagging is a way of putting multiple lables on items such as documents, photos, audio files, etc.  One can then pull similarly tagged items.  The truly interesting thing is in most online environments tags are not centrally organized.  Users choose which labels they place on digital objects.  The distributed nature of this organizing tool creates a more social form of organizing large amounts of data.  This links to a page which explains tagging, Wikipedia on Tagging.

7) Snagit is a product which can be purchased and downloaded to a user’s computer. SnagIt is a screenshot program that operates under the Windows operating system contains most features needed (scrolling page screenshots and automatic ‘trim edges’ function, for example). SnagIt Accessories extends its features. For example, Flickr Output enables the user to upload screen capture onto one’s own Flickr account. The ease of use, comprehensive features makes it one of the best cut and paste software packages available.

8) Flickr.com online photo storage allows photos to be shared and organized with tags.  One can also search thousands of copyright free photos organized by tags.  Here’s a link to a page that explains social photosharing.   Here’s a link to the flickr site for the National Zoo, www.flickr.com/nationalzoo. Two other important source of photos are Wikimedia Commons and the Morguefile.

9) Audacity is a free program that allows anyone to easily make digital audio recordings.  Digital recordings can be rendered in MP3 files (like what are used on iPods).  Any digital recording can be called a “podcast” even if it is only stored on a computer or website.  Here’s a short video explaining podcasting.

10) PhotoStory3 is a free program that allows anyone to easily make a presentation out of digital photographs.  PhotoStory3 allows users to add titles, narration, background music and different focusing and other effects on the photos and transitions between the photos.  Digital photo stories can be rendered as windows media video.  A wmv digital video file can be posted on a website, inserted in a blog, wiki and/or PowerPoint.

11) Photos can be edited with any number of photo editors.  There are rudimentary photo editors within free resources such as Flickr.com, PhotoStory3 and commercial software packages for photo editing such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements and even in some children’s educational software such as Imageblender.  There are also some free online options including Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) and Photoshop Express (http://www.photoshop.com/).

12) Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software included in Microsoft Windows. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

13) Discovery Education Streaming is a subscription service which has a)full videos, b)video segments, c)high quality still photos, d)audio clips and other media elements organized by key word and grade level.

14) Gcast.com is a free Internet site for creating and posting podcasts.  Podcasts posted on Gcast can be linked to from any web resources (blog, wiki, etc.) and reviewed multiple times from any computer or handheld device with an internet connection.

15) Youtube.com has many useful and educational video resources.  They are searchable via keyword.

16) Teachertube.com is an educational resource of videos modeled on youtube but subject specific to education.

17) iTunes is a free product which one can download onto their desktop.  It allows digital audio files to be organized and shared with others.  Audio files stored on Gcast.com can be lists on iTunes for any iTunes subscriber to download and play on their computers, iPods and/or telephones.  iTunes begins to cost users money when they purchase items from the iTunes store.

18) RSS feeds can be found on almost all websites, blogs, wikis, photo sites, and other resources on the web.  Users can subscribe to the RSS feeds for Internet resources they wish to regularly track.  Updates to those internet resources are sent to the subscribers via the RSS feeds and organized in what are called RSS Readers.

19) Google.com has many features besides gmail and the search engine.  Three specific elements are Google Sites, Google Reader and Google Earth.  Google Pages allows anyone to create multiple websites as easily as constructing a PowerPoint.  Google Reader allows anyone to follow any number of websites, blogs, wikis and other resources on the web by subscribing to their RSS feeds.  Information from those RSS feeds are then gathered into the user’s Google Reader page and displayed like email. Google Earth is one of the best mapping tools for education available.

20) Internet safety focuses on four main concerns: 1) Internet bullying, 2) Internet predators, 3) Internet identity theft and 4) Internet negative identity profiles impacting college entry and career opportunities.  All four of these aspects of Internet safety can be covered with two safety principles.  The first is to keep one’s personal information secret.  This includes name, contact information, work and school information, family information and the names of associates.  The second is to never meet anyone in real life, who one has only met on the Internet.  With these two principles, students (and teachers) can protect themselves from the major Internet safety concerns.

21) Publishing on the Internet can be done professionally while maintaining the safety of students and colleagues by following APA publishing guidelines.  By combining the APA ethical guidelines (no student identifiers, no school identifiers) with the Internet safety principles of keeping the author’s identity secret, a great deal of professional practice can be shared in an online professional learning community without fear of breaching our professional ethics.  You can review APA Ethic’s Code here.  Clairvoy is dedicated to teachers publishing strategy.  See more here.

22) Students with different learning styles (visual learners, audio learners, etc.) can better explore Blooms Taxonomy of cognitive objectives by working with the curriculum using the different media available to them in a digital environment.

23) Copyright is important and must be respected at all times.  The copyright laws regarding special education do allow for materials being used in class (which have been purchased) to be adapted to meet the needs of student IEPs.  This can call for teachers to use all the digital tools at their disposal to adapt standard text, photographic and multimedia resources to meet the needs of student IEPs.  Anyone can do this adaptation for the teacher’s needs, including students inside and outside the classroom.  Here are a number of online resources on use of copyright in the classroom.

24) Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

25) Google Earth is a tremendous tool. Hardware such as Flip video cameras (under $100), student digital still cameras, color scanners, document cameras, transferring video from camcorders to computers (Firewire pcmcia card cost around $20  / some analogue to digital video converters cost less than $50), SMARTBoards and iPods are all things with which teachers should familiarize themselves and use in their teaching.