One of the key points raised in this chapter is teachers' experience with and modeling of appropriate and acceptable use of any social networking medium. Whether we are able to use Web 2.0 to its fullest capacity in our classrooms or have to adapt activities to be more intranet based and shared among smaller groups, it behooves us as educators to model for our students and explicitly lay out guidelines for being online. We can develop these guidelines by being a part of the blogosphere professionally and consider the etiquette that we should adhere to. Several points are given in Bud Hunt's Blogging Guidelines (pg. 73) that have far reaching implications:
1. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for your blog. ...
2. Never ever ever give out or record personal information on your blog. Your blog is a public space on the internet. Don't share anything that you don't want the world to know. ...be careful what you say too. Don't give out your phone number or home address. This is particularly important if you have a personal online journal or blog elsewhere.
3. Again, your blog is a public space. . . if you put (content) on the Internet, odds are really good that it will stay on the Internet. Always...ten years from now when your are looking for a job, it might be possible for an employer to discover some really hateful and immature things you said when you were younger and more prone to foolish things. Be sure that anything you write you are proud of.
4. Never link to something you haven't read...when you link to something, you should make sure it is something that you really want to be associated with.
Regardless of the environment in which we teach in, aren't these important online skills to be modeled and explicitly stated? The environment that our children engage in outside of our classrooms is predominantly unfiltered. I believe any opportunity we have to teach them these acceptable use skills is helping prepare them for the 21st century that they live in.
Mike Slowinski from West De Pere High School in De Pere, Wisconsin, stated in an Online Etiquette document he wrote for a collaborative literature circle project, "The main purpose (of this Google Group) is to discuss the book. However, if that is all we do on there, I feel as if we would not be using this site to its full potential." As I begin to learn how to use new media in my classroom and with my students I may begin by taking assignments and projects that are currently being done offline and putting them in an online format. Yet, to truly change the nature of how we do math in my classroom, I will need to utilize forums such as blogs, wikis, and Google Docs so that students can be collaborative without the strict confines of a 52 minute period and have their work made public to each other (or the rest of the blogosphere if possible) and open to comments and critique. It is this latter component that I am excited to experiment with in the hopes that it will raise the level of student concern for the quality of their work as it is exposed to people other than their teacher, parents, and themselves.
I enjoyed this chapter too. It had a lot of practical applications for my language classroom. I am very blessed as well with a school that has several computer labs, an extensive media classroom, Smartboards in every classroom and I believe, a set of clickers (obviously, I haven't used them!). We, too, however have very limited access to the internet. But as this chapter points out, there is still so much for our students to do without having access to UTube.
ReplyDeleteThinking back to one of our class discussions about texting (i.e., while a colleague is making a presentation) and how we all agreed that seemed inappropriate--I agree with you Matt, it is our job as teachers not only to use the technology and model for our students how and when to use it but to be very specific about etiquette.
At some point in our lives we learned appropriate social behavior (hopefully) either from siblings, parents, caregivers, etc. But this new medium for communication didn't come with a specific guidebook and in many cases, it's the students who are "users" before the adults. It is imperative for us as teachers to embrace this technology so that we can model and explain the appropriate etiquette and behavior--particularly behavior we expect in the classroom.