Facilitating Collaboration - Session Two

When researching about the uses and abuses of blogs I really found the link to Electronic Frontier Foundation interesting. When I first started reading, I was thinking about using this in classes to give students an understanding of the material that may be considered appropriate to blog about. Then as I read further, I found the material supportive of the first amendment rights but it seemed to condone making editorial comments about students, teachers and schools and although it did offer warning, it seemed more like a guide to how much could be written and still be protected. It seemed a little too much like a “how to” manual for students who want to know how much can be said and done while still being protected. So while I think the content is good information for teachers and administrators, I wouldn’t use it in the classroom (as a link for additional reading) just to introduce blogging to students.

I feel an even better way to approach my school district administrators to ease control over blogs and social networking (even Google Docs falls under social networking in our district) would be to introduce the 2007 tech.blorge blog post on school – boards’ reluctance to open up such access by David Cassel. (I would like to see some new numbers posted concerning these restrictions – I’ll bet they haven’t changed very much). I also found Cassel’s comments on the double standard interesting – stating that over 35% of districts report that 90% of their staff members are already participating in social networking outside of their school day.

Finally, I think that I need to subscribe my principle and district administer to the RSS feeds of David Warlick. His simple posts (May 2006 and December 2005) are direct and to the point concerning schools turning away from the technology due to the fear. His 2005 post is a perfect example – I wonder how far we’ve actually come as an educational community. I would tend to believe that there are many educators attempting to introduce more of these technologies into the classroom every week.

Facilitating Collaboration Session One

Wow, I've been reading about the wonderful world of blogs and to be honest I thought very little of them previously. I guess it took Richardson to spell it out for me - blogs are amazingly complex and intricate and the levels of blogging he mentioned really hit home. Now I think I've been doing a good job of "true" blogging, but I didn't really know the pedagogy behind why I was being asked to maintain a blog for this program, other than documentation (which I appreciate in and of itself.)
In the book by Richardson, I've found that the balance between teacher and student is again shifting as the students have much more expertise in many of the areas of collaboration with social tools and the teachers and districts are a step (or more) behind. I like to think that I'm looking to the future and working towards implementing the 21st century skill set in my classroom and that I do a pretty fair job of it already. I also like to think that I'm ahead of the administration at the school (which is a bit tough as the principal is also the technology director) but I never imagined that even though I may be ahead of the curve in some instances, when it comes to a majority of my students I'm still light years behind. I struggle most with getting all of the students on an equal playing field as well, considering the differences in access level to the internet, interest level etc. I mean, most of my students were pushed to the limits by my Pecha Kucha (Pet-cha what? they said through their snickering) and I think their ears were bleeding because I talked so fast in many of the slides...I showed them my Animoto video on blood spatter analysis and most of them had never seen that application. So my struggle is finding the time to pull it all together - the resources, the content (I am a science teacher after all) the examples, the tools, the applications, the access etc. so that THEY can be creating and sharing. My personality type has me wanting to do so much of it right away but I can't wrap my head around one idea before our class has launched me in a new direction. I know that I just have to step back and take it one day at a time and start small (didn't Richardson say that too?)