Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Week 3 Post #3


Week 3 Post #3

The post by Scott McLoed really resonated with me.  He offered ten things to get started with.  His first recommendation refers to social networks like Facebook.  He urges educators to teach students how to change their privacy settings rather than ban them.  Similar sentiments were echoed in the Portal to Media Literacy video.
Many parents are not fluent in FB but they are allowing their children to use it.  There isn’t anyone advising or guiding them through this environment that can be so rich and powerful but is also full of pitfalls.  FB even offers help to teachers who want to try.
As educators we have been teaching children to work in groups to help prepare them for working and getting along in the world.  Working in groups online is now a necessary skill.  We also teach how to write and communicate for various other purposes.  We need to add this online medium to our teaching repertoire too. We can start in the early grades by teaching students how to carry on an online conversation using something like Kidblog and move on from there.  We can educate students on reasonable safety measures.  Convincing administrators and parents will be the tricky part.
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3 comments:

  1. Brendan DowdApril 7, 2012 at 7:51 AM

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  2. Brendan DowdApril 7, 2012 at 7:54 AM

    Cherie, thanks for the tip on Kidblog, I hadn't hear of that before. I don't teach elementary computers at our school but I can see the value of this tool for starting to teach digital citizenship at an early age. I'm going to recommend this, or see if anyone at my school has used Kidblog before.
    The video you posted seems like an amazing project. Since FB and students is such a hot topic right now it is nice to see one way in which it can be used in an educational sense. We don't have an official policy on fb yet (it is blocked at our school), but our current admin. definitely wants to steer clear from anything fb oriented. The thing is, it is such a common thing for students that we really should be teaching students how to be digitally responsible. Enter Kidblog....
    Brendan

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  3. CherieApril 9, 2012 at 7:14 PM

    Kidblog was easy to set up and easy for young students to use. We did start on paper first. I gave the first prompt and had all the students respond on paper. We hung the papers on the wall. We discussed how to make comments and how to keep a conversation going. We also came up with some rules such as use kind words and use correct spelling. After the rules were created, I gave all the students Post-it notes. They responded to the paper blogs with the Post-it notes. It gave the kids a chance to see how the whole process worked. We went to the lab the following week and they were off and running.

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