Best Practices for Educating Parents About Digital Media Issues

Perhaps the parent group at your school is struggling with the issue of how teachers, administrators, and parents can work together to head off digital issues and get more educated about digital literacy? If so, take a look at the best practices list presented in an article on the Common Sense Media site, citing what has been done in two parochial schools in San Francisco.

Second Life in Education

ISTE on Second Life hosts many valuable sessions to keep us up with the latest in technologies for our classrooms. In February, 2011, the group hosted a four-week series about teaching with iPods and iPads.  To learn more about ISTE Second Life, watch the video, Computing in the Clouds and check out the information about Second Life in education.

It’s Philadelphia for ISTE in 2011

Unlocking Potential is the theme for ISTE 2011, the International Society for Technology in Education Conference and Exposition to be held in Philadelphia, June 26-29 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.  You can do a custom program search to find sessions, papers, workshops, social events, field trips, round tables, birds-of-a-feather groupings, and more. Super Early Bird registration ends March 31 with Early Bird Registration ending May 1 and online registrations closing June 17.  If you don’t get a chance to sign up online, onsite registration will be available at the conference.  Conference themes for 2011 include: school improvement, technology infrastructure, professional learning, digital age teaching and learning, and virtual schooling/E-Schooling.

Kids & Technologies: How Student Learn

A fourth grade teacher, knowing of my interest in kids and technologies, advised, “You’ve got to read Rewired by Larry D. Rosen. It explains so much about what those of us in education need to know.” She was right. This book and other resources by Rosen give us a glimpse into the “psychology of technology” so that we will be better able to understand how our students learn. According to Rosen, the iGeneration, those students born in the 90s, expect “instant access” to information and people.  These are kids who are constantly connected through digital devices and believe that anything is possible. Additional Information about Rosen’s books is available on his site and at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Pros and Cons of Using Social Media in Your School

THE Journal’s article Keeping It Clean by John K. Waters, provides excellent information about sites like Facebook and MySpace and their use in schools. Could someone put up a fake social media page and make it look like it is your school’s official page? Yes, says an administrator at Blaine High School in Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, who adds that the person who did it has yet to be identified. The page seemed harmless at first, but then caused problems. Anoka-Hennepin decided that the best thing to do was to establish an official district page with individual pages for each school. The pages target parents, teachers, and administrators and are not pages for students to interact with school personnel or each other. In the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, students use social networking to learn about school events and to access teacher pages. Palo Alto installed LinkExtend, which includes KidSafe and ways to alert users about problem links. Some educators, like Matt Levinson (From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey) suggest that Facebook should follow Google’s example and provide a place that “teachers and students could use ... as a teaching and learning tool securely.” That’s what Edmodo does. It’s a free network that doesn’t require students to give private information. Teachers sign up for it and interaction is directed by teachers.

Tech & Learning’s Webinars

If you’re like me, you get an email notice of an upcoming Webinar, but when it’s live it doesn’t fit your schedule or you forget to attend. On the Tech & Learning site, you can view archived webinars when you have the time. Some of the webinars available include: The Five W’s of Wireless, Web 2.0 in Schools, Learning Powered by Technology, Affordable Computing for Classrooms, Is Your Network Secure, 21^st Century Skills, Netbooks in K-12, Writing an Innovative Grant Proposal, One-to-One Computing, Making Classroom Movies, Forensics, Early Reading Success, Ending the Headaches of Textbook Management, and many more.  Go to Tech & Learning and browse through the list. You’ll be sure to find a webinar that targets what you want to know.

Better Web Searching with Power Words

Here’s a new way for you and your students to search for information online. It’s called SortFix, and it works with computers, iPads, and iPhones. What SortFix does is to help pinpoint the best keywords to use in searches and also to help eliminate by keyword sites that don’t fit a search. The application works by giving you “Power Words” that you can place in “baskets” such as “Add to Search” and “Remove”. You move the “Power Words” into the baskets to help you better specify what type of sites you’d like to find. To learn more, go to SortFix and watch the demo about picking the perfect house pet. You might also want to watch the YouTube video about using SortFix to find a homemade ice cream recipe and use these tips.

Innovations to Shape the Future of Teaching

the Journal article 2020 Vision: Talkin’ about a Revolution offers suggestions about changes we may see in teaching over the next decade. The ideas come from what are called “a trio of current and former federal Ed Tech honchos” and ed tech leaders. Some of their individual predictions are: students will lead changes and the relationship between teachers and students will change; there will be more collaborative learning; physical space will become less important, but there will need to be places for face-to-face collaboration; print books will still be used, but use of ebooks and online materials will surge; school environments will be less formal; lessons will be more cross curricular; software and networks  will move off-site to the cloud; students will learn no matter where they are; all students will have their own digital devices and won’t have to wait for instruction; and there will be just-in-time access to provide students with the learning, extra help, or enrichment they need. But, with the predictions come warnings. Teacher Eric Marcos, Santa Monica, CA says that because change is so slow in schools, he doesn’t see much difference ahead for schools. Many of the ed tech leaders agree and suggest that we need to do the following: commit more resources to improving and researching tech in education; help communities embrace use of technologies; be able to “package” and “deliver” teaching by, for example, an exceptional fifth grade math teacher instead of having “fifth-grade math being taught by 10,000 teachers across the country every single day”;  create a “new generation of assessments”; invest more in broadband; and make sure teachers connect with each other.

Digital Generation Brains: Do They Work in School?

Since the evolution of Sesame Street and its engaging, fast-paced television learning, educators have wondered how classroom teachers can possibly compete with what’s enveloping student minds beyond school. Today the problem is not only beyond school, but in school as well. Keeping students from using digital devices for texting and networking isn’t easy; nor is keeping their minds on school studies. New York Times writer Matt Richtel, in his piece Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, discusses time he spent with students and staff at Woodside High School, California, where principal David Reilly says he’s “trying to take back [student] attention from the Blackberries and video games” and “to a degree, I’m using technology to do it.” In the school there are now Chinese language classes taught via iPad and audio production classes. Reilly hopes to capture the attention of students who can’t seem to focus on schoolwork because they are too involved with digital activities that offer “instant gratification.” A 14-year-old admitted sending and receiving 27,000 text messages a month, while others are up late into the morning hours on school nights playing video games, social networking, and working on digital movies. Not all educators and researchers agree that adding more tech is the way to challenge today’s students to learn, and research studies cited in the article suggest that video games hamper sleep and seem to “override” what students have studied.  Multitasking doesn’t work, and the brain appears to need downtime, not constant activity, to digest what it learns. Although there are excellent points tackled in this article that all educators must think about, the answers are still waiting. The questions remain: (1) Is the answer good teaching, whether tech is used or not, or (2) are some students so intensely involved in their digital lives that they are not able to focus no matter how effective the teacher?

Cyber Communication: Progress or Problem—What Kids Say

This year’s Optimist International Oratorical Competition for students focuses on the topic: Cyber Communication: Progress or Problem. After listening to many student speeches, these thoughts went through my mind. (1) Students, at least the ones participating in this competition, know the dangers of the Internet. (2) They know social networking sites have a minimum age, but they ignore it—it’s like it’s not there and doesn’t matter. (3) They realize cyber communication is here to stay and say people should get used to it and learn how to use it correctly. (4) They have no idea what to do about the problem of cyberbullies, but they know that it happens and feel for those who have been victims. (5) Although they text and video chat mostly, and still use email and instant messaging, many love to get written letters—one speaker even wrote an obituary of a love letter and then recited from one of Abigail Adam’s letters to John.  (6) They can’t imagine carrying a dictionary around or having to look words up in a dictionary. (7) It’s foreign to them not to be able to type their essays into the computer. “I couldn’t just sit down and write my stories on paper,” one commented. (8) They see cell phones as a necessary part of their lives, but they do not think parents should give cell phones to young children. (9) They are not sure about the option of technology to locate where they are. “That’s scary,” according to some. Others thought it could be useful for parents but noted that parents might purchase a cell phone for young children for this reason and not realize the other dangers present in cell phone options. (10) They see that cyber communication can be a powerful force for good in our world even though they realize that everyone doesn’t use it as they should—one speaker said, “You’ve got to remember that everyone isn’t nice.” Another said, “Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone so that people could make crank calls or threatening calls. We must step forward with the technologies we have today thinking how we can help our world.”