Educating them to be safe is better than blocking .

As I work on our new project , Digiteen- exploring what it means to be a digital citizen, I am more and more mindful of the responsibility we have as educators to ensure that our students are empowered to manage the web in a safe and smart way. I find that my daily conversations with students are changing as I watch the sites they visit, the amount of illegal (but innocent) downloading that they do, the way they happily play online for way too much time, the ineffective searching that they do, the 'friends' that they pick up online etc etc. I am also constantly reminded that blocking all but the most offensive and dangerous sites is all but useless . Our kids are too clever for that and their personal and online networks are too strong. Block one site and they will find the next one.
No, I am convinced that it is education that they need. Actually it's what we all need. It's not only kids that do this, I see teachers on a daily basis breaching copyright, overlooking Google searches that are a complete waste of time, looking past clear 'cut and paste' articles presented as a student's own work and telling students to go research a topic with no guidelines or strategy for doing so. And basically having little idea (or is it turning a blind eye?) of safe and secure ways to use the internet.
So it is with some gratification that Julie Lindsay passed on some news that she came across I by US congress where they have passed an update to the Children's Internet Protection Act requiring schools participating in the E-Rate program to educate students regarding appropriate behavior on social networking and chat room sites and about cyberbullying.
Of course we here in Australia are not sitting on our laurels and I'm happy to say that the Victorian DEECD offers some guidelines for schools when working online with students, teachers and parents. The solution I am convinced is in education. But we have a long way to go in ensuring that our teachers, our students and our whole school community are savvy in determining how to be an effective, safe, clever and smart digital citizen.

Wikispaces aiming for 250,000 educational wikis

Wikispaces has been aiming for the past two and a half years to achieve their goal of 100,000 educational wikis and they have done it.
And now they have set themselves a new goal of 250,000 educational wikis.
Here is a message that I left on the blog post announcement. Basically as a wikispace user for the past two and a half years, I am very happy with the service and will continue to use wikispaces as my wiki of preference.

We love wikispaces here at Wedderburn College and I can't believe that it was back in June 2006 when I set up my first wiki with wikispaces http://teaching-with-technology.wikispaces.com/ Since then we have used them for portals for classwork http://wedderburnp12.wikispaces.com/classwiki, as digital portfolios for individual students ( all set to private thanks to the generous 100,000 wikis for education initiative, http://rose0001.wikispaces.com/ and as an online repository for sharing and collaborating on a particular topic. http://discoveregypt.wikispaces.com/ http://cleversearching.wikispaces.com/ http://the-games08.wikispaces.com/ I have used a number of other wikis when collaborating with other schools who have chosen to use something different, but wikispaces are by far the easiest, most flexible and best looking IMHO. By the way I love the new skin on the manage page. It looks great. Good luck with the next 250,000.

Giving Students a Voice

Edutopia, supported by the George Lucas Foundation is a great resource for teachers. There is great depth in the site which gives a wide range of resources, lesson plans, videos, links to other blogs as well as blogs within the site.
I came across this rather simple yet powerful idea to give students a voice.

Edutopia.org wants to hear from you about which skills you think your school should teach to help you succeed in life. Kids are experts on the modern digital world, and we think it's time adults listened. Create a video stating your opinion, and submit it by October 15 -- we'll publish our favorites on Edutopia.org.

It's simple -- there are just five steps:

1. Create a video, no more than one minute long, answering this question:
   "What do you think is the most important skill to learn for your future -- and why?"
   The footage could consist of straightforward talking to the camera, or something more creative.
2. Introduce yourself with your first name only.
3. Obtain parental consent for taping and posting on the Internet if you are younger than eighteen years old.
4. Post the video on YouTube and tag it "edutopiaskills." (Note that YouTube users must be at least thirteen years old.)
5. Send an email to skills@edutopia.org, telling us your name, age, parental contact information, and hometown, and include a link to the video.

You'll need a (free) YouTube account to do the upload. Find YouTube's instructions for uploading here and for directions for tagging here.

I love the simplicity of it. I think we'll have a go next term with our Year 9/10 students.

Being a good digital citizen

I am in Melbourne at the moment participating in a two day induction program with 20 other teacher participants. We have all been selected to do a range of projects around web2.0 Collaborative learning and research. The streams of interest are around social networking or streaming media. How exciting it is to be at the cutting edge. A day of listening to what others are planning is a great way to get the juices flowing.
I want to explore the responsibilities of young people when they interact with technology. I want my students to explore how they can make a difference to themselves and others by learning more and by teaching others. I also want them to interact with other students to hopefully recognise what it is that they all have in common regarding their use of technology.
Our Grade 5/6 students at Wedderburn have recently joined up with SuperclubPlus which provides very clear guidelines and expectations for students when they are online. They receive immediate feedback if they break the rules.
In planning for this project I have been emailing Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay who have already been working in this area with their students. Julie and Vicki have established a Digiteen ning and a Digiteen wiki . Their ideas and the online resources that they have created are a source of amazing ideas and thinking. I have also come across this wiki created by many like minded teachers who are committed to educating and empowering students who use the internet rather than sticking our heads in the sand, blocking sites and jumping on the alarmist bandwagon that so often follows these issues. Let's empower our students and be proactive in educating our students and their parents how to be good digital citizens. Can't wait to get started.

One Laptop per child - 21st Century skills

I have been exploring more about 21st Century skills as I set up a new project for our students that has been funded by the Innovation Next Practice Division with DEECD. My project will involve students exploring their roles and responsibilities as global citizens. Through the use of a ning and a wiki I hope to help students to understand how we all have a responsibility to be aware and respond to global issues. I also want them to understand the role the internet plays in this scenario and that we can't use distance and time as excuses for not being involved.
My research led me to a brilliant site called The Partnership For 21st Century Skills that advocates embedding 21st Century skills into education. This is the type of site you revisit again and again and I will be using it as a catalyst for many a conversation with my students. I also found a really powerful video on this site that discusses the One Child Per Laptop (OLPC) project which aims to revolutionise the access for the poorest kids in the world by providing them with a robust, cheap, low powered laptop to use in their education. Although mighty impressive and an amazing project, what really struck me was this associated video of Professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child that gives a very short explanation about the vision of OCPC. What struck me was that Professor Negroponte talks not about the laptops themselves but about what sort of thinking and creating he envisions that the children would do as a result of having access to this technology. It reminded me of why we need to be constantly asking ourselves why we have our students work with technology and what we want them to think, do, know and understand as a result.
I plan to show this video to the teachers here at Wedderburn in the hope that it generates some discussion about what, why and how we use information technology in our classrooms.

Wordle-ing with the Olympics

Sometimes I delay writing in this blog because I want to spend time thinking and reflecting before I write. But the upshot of that I that I don't write as often as I should. So in the interests of getting something posted that might be of use to someone else, here is a little activity that I did with Grade 3/4 students using Wordle. They loved it and the teachers thought it was pretty cool too.
This is how we did it.

To start off our activity we are going to brainstorm all the words we can think of that remind us of the Olympics. I am going to write them into a word document and show in on the Interactive whiteboard as the students are brainstorming. Once we have lots of words we are going to save the document into a shared folder on the server so that everyone in the class can open it up and save it as their own.

Once everyone has the document in front of them they are each going to copy and duplicate words that are related to the country they are studying and add them to their Olympics brainstorm list

Then we are going to do something really cool with it. Everyone is going to use Wordle to create their own word clouds that shows the way they have changed words to reflect their country. The more times they duplicate their countries words, the more their words will increase in size.

Then we are going to use Ifranview to grab a screen print of it, resize it and then upload it to this blog.

We hope you enjoy the wordles.

To see more check out our burnersblog and our Grade 3/4 wiki.

An Olympic day in a Sentence

Well after another exciting day of Phelps breaking all sorts of records, the Aussie girls winning the 4x 100 medley gold relay and Romania's 38 year old Constantina Tomescu winning the womens marathon, here are the Love it or hate Olympics Day in a Sentences for this week


Janet and her Grade 6 students from Ballarat said
"Ozzies love your magnificent participation in competitive games, actively modelling excellent sportsmanship."

Daniel Drury said
It was nice to view the men’s cycling on Sunday. Great scenery with reasonable visibility. All the competitors did a fantastic job in that environment.

From Blogger in the middle earth,
Today I have a headache,
my eyeballs hurt a bit,
for all the things I did at the TV where I sit -
so if you wish to speak with me
the only thing I bid
is drop your voice a wee,
and keep it simple stupid.

Kathryn Greenhill wrote
Is money being spent on circuses when worldwide people need bread, so ignored it.

From Lucy
It's the athletes with the golden hearts, not necessarily the gold medals that I love most about the Olympics.

Matthew said
As I return to work Monday at two new schools I'm hoping for at least a bronze in filing, desk setting up, and meeting people.

From dkzody
I am cheering for Michael Phelp's mom. No one ever gives credit to the parents of these amazing athletes, and you know they have made major sacrifices for their kid to get to this point.

Hayley wrote
Hi Mrs Baird, my name is Hayley and I am 7 years old and this is my sentence: The Olympics are important to me because I know that athletes are kind and caring and show great sportsmanship and they are qualities that I want to have too!!!

Amy Pyle shared a sentence and a picture

Hiking bluff and river trails, admiring the scenery and enjoying the beautiful weather was capped each night watching the Olympics back at the lodge.






Bonnie K said
I am glued to my TV screen as Michael Phelps swims for gold after gold, making it look second nature. I can imagine what he and the young athletes have given up for this chance; what passion and dedication! In my reality, this week has been filled with stimulating work with teachers and computers and finished with a great new Woody Allen movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona. Thumbs up!

Murcha wrote
My sons have finally arrived in Beijing for the Olympic games, after a trans-Siberian train ride from Russia, where on route they were in Mongolia when Mongolia won their first ever gold medal and they witnessed the celebrations, the sheer sense of pride and bonding of a country and its citizens, that the Olympic games can bring.

And finally my sentence for the week
Why does it take the Olympics for us to knock down walls between countries, cheer for our own athletes and barrack for the underdog?