Ed Tech Ideas You’ll Like

Ed Tech Ideas: Tech Integration for Busy Teachers includes resources and ideas from Keith Ferrell, technology integration specialist at Singapore American School. On the blog, you’ll find links to keyboarding sites for kids, information about online safety, digital footprints, and 125 sites for kids and teachers. Seasonal resources are also posted, like “The 12 (Days of) Christmas Sites for Kids and Teachers” and Zeotgeist 2012: Year in Review video.

Good to Know About Google

Google’s Good to Know page with its links to information about safety online, data on the Web, data on Google, and managing data is an excellent resource for your students and their parents. It’s also a great way to help your students better understand how to be safe online and how to manage the information they want to share. The “Good to Know Campaign” in the United States offers downloadable print ads and a booklet complete with clever illustrations, which will work well in classrooms. On the “Good to Know” pages, you’ll also find a Jargon Buster and a link to the Family Safety Center.

School Websites—Are They Impossible to Manage?

As Websites become essential to schools, it’s difficult to know what should be placed on them, who should have access to what, and how to keep up with supervision and maintenance of content. If you search online for ideas, you’ll find the usual: include your AUP, stress what’s considered private information with students, provide a school calendar and contact information, set up firewalls and filters, etc. But you won’t find everything you need. For example:

1. While many school sites provide different levels of access for parents, students, and faculty, it’s not easy to decide what should go into which areas and how much of the site should be public.
   
   
2. Schools have tended not to put student names on sites, but releases sent by schools to the media often end up on media sites. Such releases may broadcast student names, pictures, and towns, and highlight involvement in specific activities. What does this mean for school Websites?
   
   
3. Although schools may not list sporting events, schedules, and their locations except for student or parent access; coaches from other schools, news reporters, and community members interested in following teams may appreciate this information. Should sports and perhaps other activity notices be public even though they detail where which students are when?
   
   
4. The whole realm of interactivity and supervision/monitoring can be overwhelming. Does your site link to social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, or Pinterest? How about student blogs? Is it intertwined with a course management system such as Moodle? How do you handle comments on your site or the social networks? The list goes on.
   
   
5. And then, there’s site maintenance of content. Are teachers keeping their Moodle pages current, is the information about your courses correct, are your staff lists and content information up-to-date, have you changed your AUP to keep up with new technologies, are the latest sports rosters posted, were the changes in the school activities schedule put online, if a correction is needed, who makes it? . . .

 Most schools can’t afford full-time Internet managers, but as parents begin to expect more and more from schools—up-to-the-minute information, photos from field trips, info on programs, videos of activities, and interactivity and resources for themselves and their children, how can schools keep up?

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.