Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Internet Safety

One of the many things I've been learning about lately is internet safety as it is a major concern in schools when teachers start using Web 2.0 tools. I participated in (listened in, actually), an on-line live discussion on this topic in Classroom 2.0.

As a number of teachers are becoming more interested and comfortable using various Web 2.0 tools such as class blogs, wikis, podcasts and voicethreads, safety and privacy issues are becoming a concern. School Districts have filtered out many sites and have programs such as Deep Freeze protecting private on-line information which have caused a certain amount of frustration for teachers attempting to engage their students in this new on-line learningenvironment.

The discussion also commented on the concern parents have about having their children's work, pictures etc posted on class blogs. The issue of educating parents on the use of Web 2.0 tools was discussed. This issues ranged from having workshops on Web 2.0 for parents as many are not on-line using blogs, wikis or podcasts to teachers using school blogs to post information for parents then adding in podcasts that can be downloaded on to iPods and listened to by the parents.

Having discussed the issue of safety and privacy with a co-worker who has had her class use a class blog and has had comments posted to it from various parts of the world, including Australia, I wonder if the activity was worth the effort in terms of the learning outcome that was intended, which is difficult for me to judge because I have not done this yet. She had to set up the blog site, send home/collect several different permission forms, teach students how to blog including the creation and use of passwords and avatars, edit the blogs through her email, I think, all on top of the regular work needing to be done in the life of a classroom teacher. The idea being that seeing their work out in the public realm and having authentic comments back creates a real feeling of ownership/authorship for the students, thereby improving their writing and engaging their interest. I love the entire idea of this type of learning activity, but not having done this yet, it also is very daunting and the worry about the safety of my students is almost overwhelming.

I have an up-coming PowerPoint presentation to give on internet safety to go along with an RCMP presentation to parents on web safety and I would be very interested in the comments from other teachers/parents on the difficulties you've had using Web 2.o tools with your class and parental concerns about the use of Web 2.0 tools in school.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

RSS Figured Out!

Taking Michelle Martin's advice on her reply to my blog, I finally got around to figuring out how to use the RSS reader I added on to Firefox! Every time I add a blog to my reader I "crow"! I actually figured out how to work the thing. There is hope for the technologically challenged! It's called "Fearless", hummed to a Bob Marley tune :)

I have even managed to import feeds and I am currently following The Bamboo Project Blog (my fav), dy/dan (also my fav) and today I added two more, The Faculty Room and The DA Pulse. I'm rather impressed with myself!