So you’re stoked. You’re ablaze with energy, inspiration, and nearly drowning in excitement. You’re ready to jump in with both feet and start swimming, a ring of fire balancing precariously on your head!
A word of warning: first, get your feet wet.
Jumping in with both feet can be the way to go, given the right situation. But more often than not, teachers inspired by the fire of a supportive community, can find themselves floundering when they return to their classrooms and try to sustain the fires of inspiration back home.
Some ideas for those first, watery steps
- Use technology as a tool for differentiation. Just because all your students could be using the tool, doesn’t mean they should. Some students will struggle with basic computer skills like copy and paste or drag and drop. What do they really need in order to be successful in the coming years? Could they explore the same skills in an equitable way without technology? Most times, the answer is yes.
- Collaborate with other teachers on shared documents. Investigate professional collaborative communities, such as TeachWeb2.0 and the English Companion Ning.
- Use something for yourself to organize your life. My own experience with using blogs has been to keep a private, personal online journal and to organize my professional life. This blog is a good example of one of the professional blogs I keep, but my school provides one that I have been learning to use more efficiently too.
Prior Precedent: Just because you can, and they have, doesn’t mean you should.
While some of us are blessed to work in technology rich classrooms where not only are we not asked to justify our use of technology, we are directed to use it well, others find themselves facing resistance from teachers, administration, and county-level hypocrisy that pressures teachers to integrate technology while blocking access to free online tools that could help them achieve their goals. Taking time to arm yourself with research and educate yourself about the potential threats, complications, or downfalls of technology can help justify a course of action that lacks support on the local level. The following are good places to look for these critical documents.
Research & Reports
- SETDA Reports and Research
- Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology
- NCREL: Critical Issues in Technology Education
- ISTE Research & Evaluation
- U.S. Department of Education
National and State Directives
- Georgia Department of Education
- ISTE Standards for Teachers and Students
- ISTE Technology Leadership Standards
- National Council of Teachers of English
- IRA Standards (Reading)
- NCTE 21st Century Literacy
Internet Safety
Cyberbullying
Netiquette
- Behave Yourself: Online Manners
- Sample Blog Acceptable Use Policy: Bud The Teacher
- Beyond Emily: Post-ing Etiquette
- E-Guides on Social Interaction: The Ten Commandments of Email
- BPL Kids Page: Netiquette for Kids
- The Core Rules of Netiquette: Remember the Human
Digital Citizenship
- DigitalCitizenship.net
- Teaching Digital Citizenship
- Digital Citizenship and Creative Content: A Teacher’s Guide
- Ning: Digital Citizenship Resources for Teachers
- ISTE Book Recommendation: Digital Citizenship in Schools
- Google Books–Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation
Moderated Email
Protecting and representing online identity through the use of Logos, Archetypes, and Symbols for Self
- Wikipedia entry on Stereotypes
- Wikipedia entry on Archetypes (references stereotypes)
- Wikipedia entry on Avatars (computing)
- Archetypes & symbols, Crystalinks
- Voki: Get Your Own Free Speaking Avatar
- WeeMee (Free Avatar Generator)
- Meez: Avatars. Games, Virtual Worlds
- Yahoo! Avatars (free with email registration)
- Cool Text: Free Logo Generator
- Retail Alphabet Game
My own experience
I want to stress here, that I am learning too. I am not an expert, in any sense of the word. I don’t have this all figured out, and so I rely on research, other teachers, and my own ability to learn to gain confidence and look for support as I experiment each year with new technology and refine the way I use familiar tools.
While blogs, wikis, and other applications I’ve written about in the past week are becoming commonplace among many classrooms these days, I have yet to have students use them in my own. I’ve used them myself, and have attempted to gain support for collaborative use from other teachers in my building, but I’ve been reluctant to pass the torch, as it were, and allow my students to have access to blogs or wikis as part of our language arts curriculum.
It’s not that I don’t think they could handle it, eventually, it’s just that the time I spend preparing them to be responsible online citizens doesn’t always transfer into the behavior I expect in an online classroom. I sometimes wish they would come to me having had a course on digital citizenship that prepared them for the kind of online interactions I so desperately want to provide in order to deepen their learning, foster independent (or at least co-dependent) learning, and prepare them for a workplace that doesn’t yet exist.
But the reality is, they don’t, at least not in Georgia. Some states are now requiring units on internet safety, such as Virginia, Texas, and Illinois. In the meantime, who will carry the burden of implementing this training in Georgia? English teachers? Media Specialists?
Because I teach children who are sometimes not yet beyond the tender age of 13, I also have the legal responsibility to adhere to child protection laws, and I have a responsibility to parents make sure their child is safe, not only from strangers, but from other students in the class, who, following the only online literacy practices they know, pilfer music, images, and other copyrighted material for their MySpace pages, engage in less than civilized online communication with their peers, and spew personally identifiable information across the blogosphere without a second thought.
Because I often find myself having to justify my interest in using free, safe, and teacher moderated online tools, I have also found myself unwittingly falling into the role of expert learner within the larger teaching community, having to educate students, teachers, administration, and county officials. The resources posted here have been invaluable in this process.
Filed under: Internet Classrooms, KMWPsi09, NWP Digital Toolbox , avatars, cyberbullying, internet safety, moderated email, netiquette, research, Standards
