Students and Technology

I have couple of lingering thoughts regarding students after today’s face to face.

Students and privacy: I am interested in finding out what policies some school have developed around students publishing school work online (for example on youtube).

As one of the yearbook advisors at my school as well as a media club advisor, these issues of privacy are very important to me — as we try to figure out how to share images with students and also have students share images that can be used in the yearbook.

Last year, our Josten’s representative (for yearbook) shared with us their Student Guide to Personal Publishing  (http://tinyurl.com/8k85w84)We used this guide as a discussion point with our students.

However to me, personal publishing such as student’s own blogs or twitter accounts is a separate issue from asking students to publish online as part of a course. Some ideas that were shared today were using private postings in youtube so that a link was required to view the content, and I heard “quiet tube” (?) mentioned. I have never heard of this and would be interested in hearing more.

One resource I stumbled across tonight was KidBlog (http://kidblog.org/why-kidblog/). Have any of you heard of it or used it?

Preparing students to use some of these available online tools:  I loved the idea of helping students to realize that their smart phones are so much more powerful a tool than they realize. I would like to introduce students to Google Calendars, Diigo, etc. Especially as a teacher of grade 11 and 12 students, I feel that there is more we can do to prepare students before they go off to university. I am trying to think about where this discussion would belong. Is it something that we try to do in specific classes? or something that would be done in mentor group. At Bayview Glen, each teacher has a mentor group of 12-14 students from grades 9-12. We meet with these students daily. Of course we face the same challenges that others brought up, where some of our students don’t even use Blackboard effectively, regardless of reminders and support.

3 thoughts on “Students and Technology

  1. Hi Melody,

    I have used KidBlog with my Grade 4 students before and it is a great resource because you can adjust the privacy settings and you can approve all posts before they are visible to the world. It is a really good introduction to web publishing for students because it is a safe environment and you can really teach them how to control their digital footprint.

    It is also free (yeah!) and you don’t need student email addresses to use it.

    It doesn’t have many fancy bells and whistles but Edublogs does if you are interested. You can still have many privacy controls and it is based on the WordPress format that we are using in Cohort 21.

    If you have questions I can show you at the next face-to-face session.

    Marcie

  2. Melody, this is a great post! You’ve raised some great areas of discussions, as well as some really interesting challenges that we all are facing, or have faced in our career. Each school would tackle these challenges differently, and at this point in Cohort 21 this is a great avenue to stroll down, and get feedback from others.

    In terms of introducing some of these social media tools to students, there are a few of us in the Cohort that are already leveraging them amongst colleagues, adviser-groups (similar to the group of students that you’ve mentioned), and in their classes as well. For example, I am already using Diigo extensively in class and in my administrative role. I am also using Blogger with my students and adviser-group.

    Next session, we can certainly tackle how to approach implementation effectively. You’ve already mentioned one major obstacle 🙂

    Thanks for the thoughts,
    garth.

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