Teaching Sagittarian
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Ding Ding …… Round Course Two begins for CoETaIL.Asia
Enduring Understandings:
- Online behaviors and actions impact the access and safety of personal information.
- Responsible use of online tools can help protect the personal information of others.
Essential Question:
When and where should we be teaching students about their digital footprint?
This weeks readings were from Kim Komondo’s Your Online Reputation Can Hurt Your Job Search and Protect Your Digital Footprint from kutv.com
I was fortunate enough to have our afternoon presenter, Silvia Tolisano, stay with me after her presentation at ISB. We discussed in depth one night the need to own your domain name and those of your children. Thankfully my name and those of my children are unusual enough to still be available domain names. What I have realised I need to do is take charge of my blog name so that I can continue to control what happens with it. I’d not really given any thought to what might happen if someone decided to “kick me off” my name. All my thoughts and ideas would disappear over time as someone began to use my name legally. Whilst I would like to believe that no-one would do that deliberately, I realise that not everyone is as idealistic in web ethics as I am.
Google Alerts, RSS feeds of Google Search Terms, Technorati and Edublogs’ incoming links have always kept me informed of how my digital footprint is impacting on others. I believe it is necessary to keep an eye on how and when our names are being used on the internet for a variety of reasons.
Clarence Fisher also believes that tracking your digital footprint is an essential part of working online and these are essential basic skills for us and for our students as well. His Digital Footprint blog post is an informative read as he shares how he tracks his digital footprint and the reasons why he does it.
It is great to see what people are writing about you. It gives you a chance to respond to posts people write and also it keeps your finger on the pulse of any ongoing conversations.”
I listened to Ewan McIntosh, at an unconference session at Learning2.0 in Shanghai, about how he has already begun to protect and nurture his young daughter’s digital footprint before she is even old enough to walk let alone blog! I remember thinking how that was just a little bit over-the-top but as my learning journey continues down the path of 21st Century Digital Literacy, it has become more obvious that looking after your digital footprint is the same as looking after any of your tools in your toolbox and it’s the same as looking after your own reputation. YOU need to do it – no one else is going to.
Online safety and digital citizenship in the classroom when working with blogs, wikis and any other tools that leave a footprint of ourselves online is a message that we, as educators, have a responsibility/need to continually push at ANY level. It’s no different to teaching encouraging students to respect themselves, or respect one another in any space they are in.
Only this time the space is the internet and this space keeps a record of all behaviour – the good, the bad and the ugly.
And anybody can look at it. Anytime. Anywhere.
Image Attribution: TeachingSagittarian
What I enjoy most about Clarence Fisher is that he’s real. His classroom is real. His students are real. His successes are real and his failures are real. Clarence’s blog Remote Access is testimony to that realness.
I like the way his classroom pulls all the information together. Our second f2f session today (our first full day though) began with this video put together by Wendy Drexler’s high school students as they made sense of “The Networked Student” just before Clarence skyped in to talk to us.
Part of the conversation after watching the video talked about how can you pull information? How do you find the time to do it? How do you check out the information? I think Clarence did a great job in answering those questions for people even though he was unaware of the discussion prior to skyping in.
Clarence described his students as “hubs”. Sometimes we teachers miss valuable pieces like that. Sometimes we don’t know enough about the networks in our classrooms. He spoke of a group of middle-school girls in his classroom who are a “hub” – they are networked – to each other. They sit together, they work together, they produce things together, they help one another, they support one another. Then he spoke of another “hub” of networked students – some boys. The difference between the two “hubs” was their network extend 3600kms outside the classroom! Neither group is any less connected/networked. The teacher is still a “hub” be it in a different way. The teacher is still in charge of the learning goal.
Clarence relies heavily on RSS feeds into the classroom. He teaches his students about the power of RSS. He teaches his students how to pull feeds from blogs around the world, he teaches his students how to make information come to them and by doing so, he encourages them to talk about what they are learning and uses it to help his students have a voice out in the world. And they do. He’s shown his students the power of their voices and how to express the things that they really care about. He’s shown them how they can have a voice.
That’s powerful stuff. That’s real stuff. That’s how we can spread our ideas more powerfully. Thanks for talking to us Clarence! Hope that glass of wine was nice!
What is best practise? Facilitated by David Jakes and Clarence Fisher during a Learning2.0 Conference unconference session.
The conversation was rich, it was real and it was authentic. There were lots of questions, lots of discussion, not lots of answers.
Is it making the task authentic? Is it making the teaching and learning transparent? Is it building relationships? Is it collaboration? Is it using the right tool for the job? Is it establishing the climate? Is it transferring knowledge? Is it accepting the differences? Are you applying technology in the right way?
It doesn’t matter how you engage the kids – the key thing is that you are actually engaging the kids. But is there a danger that it’s easy thinking? Thinking of the guy that just lectures and the kids dig it! I bet he’s passionate!
Teachers telling teachers what they are doing? Find out what others are doing – are we overburdening our students?
If we make a list will that lock down what best practise is? Is this dangerous? Isn’t best practise really about meeting the child where they are at and moving the child on?
A conversation participant mentioned location – what was best practise in a classroom in Africa where she was teaching before is certainly not best practise in the International School classroom she is in now in.
We looked at Darren Kuropatwa’s blog to see the practise that he has going on in his class through technology. Building a community. Megacognition – Scribepost – I want to look at that. The blog has feed windows brings in classrooms from around the world. His kids can virtually visit other classes. All of Darren’s classes are podcasted – whiteboard work has been uploaded up to slideshare. He has 4 of his own children, so this is not a man that spends all his time on the computer! It obviously has to be dead-easy system- apparently he has it set up so that this takes about an extra 10 minutes of his day. All the work of the class is on the web. Accessed and re-accessed anytime, anywhere.
So is best practise about offering the tools that are right for each student’s learning? What does this mean for the teacher that is not comfortable with all this technology? What if you think these are really great ideas and you strive to be the best teacher you can be and you just don’t know how to do this stuff? I really admire the work of Darren Kuropatwa – but I don’t know how to begin with half of the stuff he’s doing? I know that I have the resources at my fingertips and the personal learning network to learn how though – and is that really what best practise is all about?
So is best practise whatever engenders our students to learn whatever it is that they need to learn both within their own communities, and outside those communities?
At the end of the day does best practise mean it’s all about the relationships we build both inside and outside the classroom?
Clarence Fisher: Click: Classroom Life in the Fast Lane
Has a combined class of 23 Grade 7 and Grade 8 in a small town. Sees connections as important. His classroom looks like a coffee-shop. Classrooms need to be different spaces. Simple things like setup have an impact on learning – it allows a certain type of learning to happen. It’s a signal that there’s a different kind of learning able to happen in the classroom.
Teacher is the network administrator (not the guy that fix the computers) His job is to hook kids up into a learning network – you need to do that for them in the beginning. Asks his students what are you learning from the people you are reading. If they aren’t learning anything he says well why are you reading them? And also what are you contributing.
Classroom is studio. Think about occupations that have studios. Redefines your classroom – it’s ok if people are doing different things at different times – it’s ok if there is choice. Starts off as simple choice but as the year goes on the choice becomes more. Eg. blog a post, record a podcast, paint a picture.
58 different ways to show your learning – how cool is that?
Once you start connecting your kids to the world you are no longer the smartest person in the room. It’s not about you giving the information out – it’s about you helping it happen. Fishing the Web. The content at any one point is not important – it’s the portal that gets you there.
How it works in Clarence’s Classroom
Has iGoogle page. On it, it has 5 blogs. It’s the required reading. I guess these were carefully chosen to ensure that the students had a real, authentic and interesting perspective to read.
Uses Global Voices online – it’s an aggregator – you can pick a country and a topic and will pull it all together. This is the “Social Studies” text book – he doesn’t have an actual textbook in the class! This is information IN (through RSS)
Information OUT is a blog called Upload and a Wiki http://studyingsocieties.wikispaces.com
The students write their own textbook for Social Studies.
When the information goes up, the wiki starts to self-edit. The kids correct each other, readers correct the information, you can hear kids talking in the hallways about the information – that’s when you know the kids have got it.
Branding – gives the kids something to belong to. Wordle – makes a tag cloud!! A couple of times a year he gets them to copy and paste their blog posts into wordle and they make a tag cloud to see what they are blogging about. It’s a visual way to see what they are writing about. They can see what they are feeling the most or least strongly about. They can see the data – and do some reflection.
There’s so much free stuff out there – Clarence pays $25 out of his own pocket on technology. That’s it.
When you can place assignments online they become alive – if it goes into the teacher’s inbox at the back of the classroom – that’s it – it’s over. But put it on line – it comes alive, it’s at their finger tips. It’s more complex literacy – just look at @manyvoices that happened in twitter. They used Lulu.com and published little books with the story in! It was a literacy success that meant something to the students. They wrote it with 12 other schools! It came alive.
Phun and Scratch – both free. Draw stuff, then it moves. It teaches students that technology is for them but they have to control it. ( I need to look at Phun and Scratch for my Grade 5 students)
Kids learn so much more when you allow kids to put their heads together and show their learning, be creative and innovative and THINK. Make something with their learning.
Assessment: Rubrics and conferences – the studio model – does lots of thinking, have questions, discussions. Takes a lot of different forms. Give the kids the rules up front. If you want them to hit a target – tell them what the target is. Give them checklists that they can tell where they should be at this point. Where are you on this? What do you need to improve? What do you need to do? You need built in stops – it’s not good to go 4 weeks without checking in.
There’s five or six things going on in Clarence’s classroom – it’s chaos, it’s noisy but it is productive. He stops kids often. What do you see, what do you hear? (Ask the kids to do those things and it becomes second nature).
Our five years is up – the traditional classroom and traditional way of learning is no longer good enough. If you can give kids thinking, choice and give them the time.
All the slides will be on slideshare and up on the ning.
I have to keep pinching myself because it seems so far-fetched that I’m flying to Shanghai, China in 6 days to attend the Learning2.0 Conference beginning with Edublogger Con on Thursday 18th September AND I get to fly with two fabulous friends and awesome bloggers Kim Cofino and Tara Ethridge AND catch up with fellow NZder Simon May who lives and teaches in Shanghai.
This is an amazing opportunity to catch up with invited guests David Warlick, Ewan MacIntosh, whom I have the absolute pleasure to meet and listen to already, as well as the chance to meet and listen to Clarence Fisher, Brian Crosby, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Alan Levine and David Jakes. That in itself just makes me incredibly excited.
My twitter network was a-twitter last week with questions of “Are you going to Learning2.0?” My excitement was pushed three more steps up as I began to discover that many of the amazing people in my twitter-network were going to Shanghai also. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of fellow educators/bloggers from Australia and Qatar (can’t wait to meet you finally Julie!). There’s going to be so much meeting and greeting – I was beginning to wonder when we might get time to attend a conference?!
Who would have thought that my excitement could step up a notch after all that? I didn’t think it was possible, but Jeff Utecht made it so. He asked if I would be interested in doing a 45 minute presentation at Learning2.0 Shanghai! Oh my goodness! Are you kidding me? Me? Present? With all those famous people you already have lined up? What a fabulous chance to give something back to the very community that got me started on this amazing journey of Web2.0 in the classroom. Thanks for the opportunity Jeff!
So here’s the blurb for my presentation ………. now I just need to put the finishing touches on it.
