Written by Bloomberg Businessweek recently published an article by Devin Leonard entitled ‘The iPad Goes to School’. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/the-ipad-goes-to-school-the-rise-of-educational-tablets Technology, it seems, is the only natural next step to educating our future citizens. The proof seems to be out there; students learn with more access rather than less. Our children can learn to be responsible citizens both in the digital world and in the ‘real’ world, whatever that is.
There is one thing that has been rattling around in my head since I started getting access to some educational threads, feeds, tweets, blogs and sweets on line – just how much control do we really have over our digiverse selves? I am writing on this blog page and for the first time my voice is out there. Some of my students the other day mentioned they had Googled me and found my blog with a silly picture of me in front of a lot of food. I tried unsuccessfully to let them know this is what is hip these days. . . then I had to explain what ‘hip’ meant.
Hmmmm . . .
I had a great prof when I was doing my masters that argued that we NEED to have a digital presence today. It is, in fact, irresponsible for us to have zero presence online in today’s day and age…what we need to be thoughtful about it how we curate this digital story we are telling about ourselves.
I think we should be Googling ourselves, assuming that the parents and students we are connected to are already doing this. If we find things that don’t represent our “teacher persona”, we should consider editing this. I personally think this is awesome modelling for our own students and something that teachers could explicitly model!
Hi Celeste,
I definitely agree that digitizing our conversations is a great way to model responsible use of the internet. And by the way, isn’t it great when we have great teachers!
Well I am finally moving into having a digital presence as a teacher after 4 years of just being online as Mardi the Food Blogger 🙂 Years ago I used to do a lot of teacher training and if you Googled me you’d have found that. Then I briefly has a presence as a MA student, PhD candidate and I spoke at a lot of conferences. But Cohort 21 is the first time I have actually been “online” as a teacher proper. It’s definitely always at the back of my mind that I AM a teacher, whatever hat I happen to be wearing online!