למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

The report says one of the reasons for the greater gains in primary schools may be that there was more scope for flexibility in the curriculum.

"There was a pattern of inspectors disregarding the use of ICT as an integral part of learning across the curriculum and, in some cases, not accepting evidence presented through ICT," the report said.

"Clearly, in ICT-rich schools ICT is no longer 'merely' a curriculum subject but a vehicle for learning across the whole curriculum and this needs to be built into inspection criteria."

תוויות: דיווחים, סטנדרטים

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה, הרהורים

A rule against physical contact at Kilmer Middle School, about 10 miles west of Washington, is so strict that students can be sent to the principal's office for hugging, holding hands or even high-fiving.

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה, הרהורים

תוויות: בלוגים, ויקי, כלים חברתיים

First of all we should never call any program a “Laptop Program”. We certainly do not have pencil and paper programs. As soon as a school or district places the focus on the technology I believe it is doomed to fail. The real work is not adding technology to our industrial school design, but reengineering the culture of teaching and learning.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

Will the kids who grew up with the Net (let's call them After Netters) become more like their elders (let's call them Before Netters) as they take on full-time jobs, relationships, children and the other stuff of adult life? Having once craved attention, will they now shun it? Or will they continue to live their lives in public, chronicling their ups and downs in ways their elders will find befuddling and disturbing?

Today, it's pretty obvious that having the HR guy at your prospective employer find photos of college beer bongs isn't a good idea. But that Before Net guy running HR isn't going to be in his job forever. Before too long he'll give way to an After Netter with an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it.

increasingly there's something odd about a person who seems to leave no Google trace.

The problem is that the generation that has grown up with the Internet may have access to the world, but they still think parochially, either just about their high school or college campus. When my sister- in-law recently confronted her daughter about about some postings and photos on MySpace that might give some prospective employers the wrong idea about her, my niece was shocked and said, "but that's private!"

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה, נוער

Students use technology to …

In the beginning, there was technology — and there was the urge to teach how to do technology. Possibly this came out of our own lack of confidence with the new information and communication tools, but a set of standards that itemized and specified machine-oriented skills was what we got, and it’s what we needed. They were clear, and it was easy to imagine teaching children how to boot up a computer and access the Web.

The problem that’s been scratching at my nerves is “What does this look like in the classroom?”… Well, picturing some of this in the classroom is not difficult. But some of it is hard. It sounds too big!

I, too, have been referencing the new standards and also feel that they are difficult to digest. I have spent time with the draft version, trying to note in the things we are currently doing with kids so they’ll make more sense to teachers. I have my fingers crossed that ISTE will be releasing grade level indicators for the refreshed standards, as were available with the previous version.

With all due respect, why are you looking to an anonymous committee to tell you what to teach, especially at grade levels? Do you really require such granularity?

Any such proclamation is bound to be deliberately vague (to work everywhere) and arbitrary. If some set of standards says that digital video is a 6th grade activity does that mean that kindergarteners cannot make movies prior to learning to write, despite the evidence that it may be a beneficial tool for storytelling?

It’s time for us to take responsibility for what we teach without depending on buying random lists of stuff from others.

• Exposing the value of information is very closely aligned with Information Fluency.
• Employing information requires the creative use of information tools, inventing solutions to new problems, and thencritically examining the results.
• Expressing ideas is entirely about communication.
• Ethics is responsibility, and, in my mind, that’s what digital citizenship should be about - learning to use information responsibly.

None of this happens without the tools. They are not the outcome, but the avenue, and the avenue is constantly changing.

תוויות: סטנדרטים

When we got noticed in the local newspaper, I put the Statcounter code on one of the template files to track our visitors. I was amazed to see how many people visited the kids site. Lots more than read this blog, as a rule. And they generally find the site with Google searches for things like the strongest pokemon in sinnoh, or pokemon how to get to outer space. It seems that my fourth-graders created something there’s a demand for, even if I couldn’t appreciate or understand it. What do I know?

For instance, there was this real excitement over reading about (ahem, looking at the pictures of) different Pokemon characters on Wikipedia. This wonderful discovery came from reading some of the posts from Doug Noon's fourth grade bloggers. So I watched for a couple of days, finally put my foot down, and said, no more just clicking on this or that to just see pictures of the different characters. Get off Wikipedia, for goodness sake. Kind of like a teacher might not allow somebody to "read" Where's Waldo? day after day.... Know where those boys eventually wound up? - reading and rereading the posts on Pokemon from Doug's kids.

תוויות: בלוגים, שימוש בבתי ספר

It is easy to get caught up in all the fanfare about blogs, wikis, social-network sites, podcasts, vodcasts, and the latest Web 2.0 tools. However, let us not forget what it is we are really after.

Be able to Connect
Be able to Create
Be able to Communicate
Be able to Collaborate

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים

"It wasn't done maliciously," she added. "It wasn't done to try to take someone else's words for my own."

Calabro said she didn't tell the students she was delivering a speech posted on the Web site About.com because "it didn't even dawn on me to give credit, because it was a public speech, and this was a sample" speech.

The Web site where she found the speech "didn't say I could use it, but it didn't say I couldn't use it," Calabro said. She also said she consulted an attorney, whom she declined to name, and was told she did nothing illegal.

Speechwriting is all about knowing your audience and addressing their concerns. Leave your audience with something about which to think. Include humor and inspirational quotes. But make sure that each of these are integrated into the whole. Study the great speeches of the past to find inspiration. The joy that you will feel when you have given a speech that has inspired people is amazing and worth the effort. Good luck!

A student who attended the ceremony recognized some of the passages in the speech and checked it against the Web site.

תוויות: העתקה-הדבקה

At a recent panel in D.C. called: Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization, the top researchers in the field basically debunked the stranger danger fear as being greatly exaggerated, painted a clearer picture of who is really at risk, and admitted while the fear-based approach has been working in terms of teens being more careful and using more enhanced privacy settings, it probably should be retired.

I wish I had some tips to offer on how to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The reality is that in today's totally wired world, your digital image just isn't your own -- especially if it's being taken by someone else (including the media). Once it's online, this type of internet celebrity is possible whether you asked for it or not. The most you can do is just be aware that this can happen and be prepared to deal with it if it does.

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה

I was asked by a teacher the other day how I continued to find new tools and technologies that can be used for education. She didn't believe me when I told her that I learned about most sites through fortune cookies, so I confessed the truth.

I don't just read educational blogs.

I generally agree with what most people have to say on those blogs. I have a vast amount in common with my fellow EduBloggers, and while reading what they have to say is comforting and affirming, it doesn't always challenge my current thinking and ideas.

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים