Posted on April 27th, 2008 by
ccorell
Educate, educate, educate and supervise, supervise, supervise!!! These are the two strategies that I feel are important to keeping our students safe while they use the Internet at school or at home. Virginia is to be commended for taking a stand for Internet Safety.
We are currently educating all our personnel who work with and/or supervise students. Our county has decided that all personnel will complete the I-Safe training before school starts this Fall. We are providing this at each school in 2 days of 2 1/2 hour sessions. This has been a positive and eye opening experience for many of our personnel. They have gone home and asked to see their childrens MySpace page and in some cases had the child remove items from the page.
We are also working on an Internet Safety curriculum for grades PK-12. Some lessons have been taught this year but more will be implemented next school year. We are also providing Parent Internet Safety sessions and have created an Internet Safety web page for parents to access for more information. This page can be accessed at http://tazewell.k12.va.us/internetsafety/index.html.
When our teachers and children use the Internet at school they have to login with a user name and password. We also filter sites and block and unblock as necessary. These things are not enough so as stated above we are now educating our personnel and students so that they will understand why the precautions are necessary and why they also need to supervise and be supervised.
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Filed under: Internet Safety
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by
ccorell
As I watched and/or listened to videos and podcasts, I was truly amazed at how many good resources are out there for teachers to use. I am also amazed that so many teachers are taking time in their busy curriculum schedules to incorporate the making of these videos/podcasts. Using students is a dual learning purpose. These students are placed in a learning environment that teaches them and also teaches others who watch and listen to their productions.
As I watched the assigned videos and podcasts, I was struck by the message of the video entitled “Technology Fear Factor in Education”. This video basically said that we are afraid of the new technologies and are keeping these out of our school curriculum. It also stated that we need to be teaching students how to use the new technologies so that they use them correctly when they are on their computers outside of the school day. Teaching them how to use the technologies will help ensure that they are using them safely and correctly. Schools need to find ways to allow the filters to protect students without hindering their education.
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Filed under: Podcasting, Video Streaming
Posted on April 6th, 2008 by
ccorell
Really Simple Syndication(RSS) – to understand this term you have to also know about feeds, aggregators. etc. Signing up for feeds and using the aggregator allows updated information to come to you without you going to get it from the web site. This feature is a really valuable web tool. When searching the web you find numerous sites that have RSS feeds. Deciding which ones to subscribe to can be a hard decision. I signed up on Bloglines and added several feeds to my account.
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Filed under: RSS
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by
ccorell
We were used to the terms native, immigrant, citizenship… and now we have to learn the definitions of the new terms such as digital native, digital immigrants, and digital citizenship. Just as we get used to those new terms here come more including blogs, wikis, tubes, flickrs, ustreams, pods, virtual, webcam, twitter, wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook…
With all this new digital stuff comes other issues to deal with like helping students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and to practice legal and ethical behavior. As students use the Internet to participate in all the new digital activities they much consider how to properly practice responsibility and safety. These fascinating new tools can enhance the instruction and learning of our students and make them lifelong learners.
Where are we going from here??
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Filed under: Digital
