Thanks to Brian Phelps for the link to this incredible video filmed in February of 2006. I was mesmerized and didn’t even notice the time. Besides, the guy is hilarious. But his message is extremely important.
In order to serve our students well, we must move into the 21st Century with them.
Click the picture below (once) to open the movie in a new page:
Online student-teacher friendships can be tricky
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/12/studentsteachers.online/index.html
By Mallory Simon
CNN
(CNN) — Randy Turner knows there’s a huge gap in age and technology between him and his adolescent students.
Critics say social-networking site communications blur the necessary line between educators and students.
So when the 52-year-old set up a MySpace page and his students began asking to add him as a friend and sending him questions about assignments, he realized he was on to something.
“Just the very fact that I have MySpace makes them think, ‘Well, maybe we can talk to this guy and open the lines of communication,’ ” said Turner, who teaches English at South Middle School in Joplin, Missouri. “I realized this is a major way of communication for them.”
MySpace had 72.8 million national users in June, versus Facebook’s 37.4 million, according to a ComScore Media Metrix study. Once available only to students with college e-mail addresses, Facebook opened its virtual doors to everybody two years ago.
Despite perceptions, the sites aren’t populated just by teens and 20-somethings. A 2006 ComScore survey found that half of those registered on MySpace were 35 and older, while a similar study last year found that almost 40 percent of Facebook users were above 35.
Teachers such as Turner believe sites like MySpace help them connect with their students about homework, tutoring and other school matters. But others fear the social-networking sites are breeding inappropriate relationships between teachers and students.
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In Missouri in particular, a rash of student-teacher sexual relationships have spawned crackdowns on social-networking friendships. Web site badbadteacher.com, which keeps track of teachers disciplined, arrested and convicted of inappropriate behavior with students, lists 11 such teachers from Missouri within the last two years.
Which is why state legislator Jane Cunningham is sponsoring a bill in the Missouri House of Representatives that would ban elementary school teachers from having social-networking friendships with their students.
Turner said he understands the reasoning for the bill. He acknowledged that in some cases, teachers have become the public face of inappropriate Facebook and MySpace relationships with kids.
“I see where they are coming from,” Turner said. “You can’t argue with people whose intentions are trying to protect children. But the simple fact is, you take these people who prey on children and they are going to find a way to do it, whether it’s over Facebook or not.”
Those teachers are ruining it for the ones legitimately trying to help children, Turner said.
“There are so many kids who are stubborn against anything teachers say, who are struggling in the classroom and refuse to ask for help,” Turner said. “When it’s so hard to reach these kids, why would you remove any of the weapons at your disposal to make a difference?”
Facebook does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register, according to its Web site. Users must be at least 14 to register on MySpace, although such age restrictions are difficult to enforce.
In addition to the bill in the Missouri legislature, other school boards, teacher unions and parent-teacher associations across the country are drafting policies and issuing advisements about which online or text-messaging relationships are acceptable.
The Lamar County School Board in Missouri recently implemented a policy forbidding teachers and students from having any text-message conversations or social-networking friendships.
Jim Keith, an education lawyer who represents several school boards in Missouri, has been giving talks to teachers in which he explains that most of the inappropriate student-teacher relationships start out on a friendship level.
Keith spoke of one instance where a parent thought her child was spending extra time with a teacher who was trying to help her child overcome shyness. At Keith’s urging, they checked the child’s phone bill and found 4,200 text messages between the teacher and student.
“As an educator, there is a line of demarcation between you and your student,” Keith said. “It’s a line that you cannot come close to, let alone step over. You’ve got to establish it from Day One and say, ‘I’m not your buddy; I’m not your friend; I’m just your teacher.’ “
Keith agrees that teachers sometimes need to communicate after school with students about educational matters, but he said that’s why teachers in Missouri have their own class pages hosted by their school districts. Those pages eliminate the need for Facebook or MySpace, he says, and allow the schools to monitor all student-teacher communication.
Many students, including Dixie Johnston, a senior at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, said that although their teachers have school-sponsored pages, most students rarely check them.
Turner insists that Facebook and MySpace aren’t the evils that regulators should be after. Instead Turner wishes the focus remain on vetting the teachers being put in charge of the nation’s youth.
“It’s a sad thing, but with teaching you are going to have people who are attracted to the profession because of easy availability of kids,” Turner said.
“Those predators are going to be there. But most of the time there are warning signs, and that’s what we need to be working on, getting those people out … not stopping teachers who haven’t caused problems from reaching those who need [help] most.”
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Tags: technology
Teaching to students’ minds, not just to the test
| Dr. James G. Merrill |  |
VIRGINIA BEACH
After two years of quiet planning, the superintendent of schools has unveiled his vision. Jim Merrill wants to overhaul teaching and focus on critical thinking instead of test preparation.
For the past decade, the state’s public schools have adjusted teaching to fit Standards of Learning tests, the yardstick used to measure school performance.
“You could pass SOLs and still fail a kid,” Merrill said.
His new direction is the key idea behind a six-year plan. The School Board will consider a draft at its annual retreat this weekend.
To prepare, the board heard a presentation by Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He told them that although about three-quarters of students and teachers believe high school graduates have learned the basics, only about a third of employers and college professors agree.
“We need to teach all students to think,” Wagner said.
Merrill’s vision includes preparing students with 21st-century skills such as writing, innovation, motivation and collaboration.
“This is what teachers want to do, anyway,” Merrill said. “I think that’s what they’re saying when they say they’re sick of teaching to the test. We have dampened them a lot with accountability.”
That doesn’t mean teaching the state standards will go away.
“It’s about changing how you do instruction,” Merrill said. Principals will hear his ideas in August, and training would be rolled out gradually.
“I think that’s fantastic,” Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said of Merrill’s plan. “I think we should always encourage schools and teachers to be creative.” He said he’d support adjusting the SOLs to measure new skills.
Mary Voss, a Beach parent on the strategic planning committee, said technology is changing faster than students can keep up.
“If we teach them how to find the information they need - how to be learners - they’ll be capable of handling whatever’s thrown at them,” she said.
One major way to get students interested in learning, Merrill said, is by making it relevant and hands-on.
A group of teachers at Lloyd C. Bird High School in Chesterfield County plans to start doing just that this fall. A few dozen students will do several design projects, each tied to their core classes.
For example, the students may be assigned to build a catapult in their engineering class, said coordinator Nancy Hoover. In physics, they’ll learn about projectile motion and angle. In math, they’ll graph angle and range to learn the relationship, she said.
“We don’t have to do this the way we’ve always done it,” Principal Beth Teigen said. If the pilot works, the school hopes to expand the concept.
Wagner told the board that Virginia Beach may be unique if it implements its ideas citywide.
“We have an opportunity, collectively, to do something amazing,” he said.
The idea of broad-based change excites Virginia Beach board members. Creative, project-based learning is already being done in some schools and programs around the city.
“What we teach students in gifted education, we should be teaching all of our students,” board member Sandra Smith-Jones said. “That’s what we’re missing.”
Merrill said it’s worth taking the risk that test scores might stagnate or drop in the short term.
“I feel a very strong, compelling motivation for doing what’s really right for a change,” he said.
Dominic Melito, head of the Virginia Beach Education Association, said teachers will need to feel they can try new approaches without endangering their jobs. If that happens, test results will follow, he said.
“There’s no reason we can’t be a model for the region, the state and the nation.”
Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com
Tags: web2.0
The Smithsonian Institute Encyclopedia looks like a great place for students (and us) to BEGIN research. Of course, we have to remind the students that they’re not in grade school any more, and they have to go beyond encyclopedias, so good luck with that.
Tags: web2.0
If you teach grammar, you may find the sites listed here helpful in engaging your students.
http://flesolcobbcentral.typepad.com/tech/2008/06/interactive-gra.html
Tags: web2.0grammar
We receive a lot of forwarded spam emails from people in the school. Here’s an eye-opening experiment that should help you to remember to delete and empty trash rather than forwarding or replying. If you don’t know them, ignore them!
And no, you’re not getting an inheritance from someone in Nigeria, and that iPod is NOT free.
Remember to set your Junk Email filter. The Help file in Outlook will tell you how.
For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cybersense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee Inc. experiment was a bit of a lark.The idea of McAfee’s Global SPAM (for Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool’s Day — was to have 50 volunteers from 10 different countries answer every spam message and click on every pop-up ad on their PCs.What would happen if everyday people, armed with a PC and an e-mail account provided by McAfee did that? Mooney and the rest of the volunteers chronicled the results in the Global SPAM Diaries.Mooney — who had observed her family’s PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus — was game, especially because McAfee was giving free PCs to all participants. McAfee selected her and the other 50 volunteers from a field of 2,000 people who applied to be part of the adventure.By the time it was all over, after every bank-account phishing scam, Nigerian bank scheme, and offer for medication, adult content and just plain free stuff had been pursued. “I was horrified,” says Mooney, a real estate agent by profession. “It’s all snake oil. I’m amazed at what true junk is out there when you’re clicking through on e-mail.”On Tuesday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor of IT security products released the results of its free-wheeling month-long experiment, which was undertaken largely to illustrate — if you hadn’t guessed already — how spam is connected to malware and criminal activity, not to mention some of the slimiest marketing ever devised.
Each SPAM volunteer saw an average of 70 spam messages arrive in their in-box each day, with men receiving about 15 more per day than women. That was a lot to answer, but “Penelope Retch” — the alias that Mooney chose for her SPAM adventure — answered every single message.
The spammed life of Penelope RetchIn her guise as Penelope Retch, Mooney dutifully answered all of the e-mail that came into her account. “I’d see an interactive spam, open it, click on it and ask to be removed. That would only make it worse,” she says. “They’d say no.”
Whether she was trying to win an iPod online or get free travel brochures, weight-loss tea or Maybelline eyeliner, Mooney found that the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail would land at her doorstep, directed to the attention of Penelope Retch.”One of the mail offers I got was a $7,500 credit card for Penelope Retch,” Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postal carrier somewhat aghast. “It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address,” she says, adding, “I am concerned about the environment.”
Mooney clicked through on the phishing e-mails that took her to fake Web sites for Wells Fargo and other banks. She sat back as the supposed government of Nigeria sought to give her an inheritance, and she watched a foreign IP address go after a dummy PayPal account that had been set up as part of the SPAM experiment.
The most obvious result of the experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.According to McAfee, which selected five people from each of 10 countries for the SPAM experiment, the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 spam messages over the course of the month.Brazil and Italy were in the 15,000-plus category, and Mexico and the U.K. above 10,000. Australia, the Netherlands and Spain were in the 5000 to 9000-plus range. The SPAM volunteers in France and Germany got the least spam, less than 3,000 messages for the month. McAfee didn’t include what it calls “gray mail” (e-mail that arrived after participants signed up for a newsletter, for example) in this count.
Phishing e-mail accounted for 22% of the spam received by the Italian volunteers and 18% of the messages received by the U.S. participants. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English. French- and German-language messages were the only non-English spam to amount to more than 10% of spam received by the participants in France and Germany respectively.
Among the oddball facts that emerged was the finding that come-ons to a fake Chase.com site represented the most common phishing e-mail spotted during the project, and that the British volunteers received the most Nigerian scam e-mail.
In addition to Mooney, the other SPAM participants also kept blogs about the experience, which some found amusing and others disturbing. A participant in Australia named Marika wrote, “I don’t know whether I would feel safe to surf to that extent again. I tried to sign up for jobs that would generate an at-home income with what seemed like respectable sites, however these sites led to massive amounts of spam.”
Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife
Please read this article about TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION when you get a chance. It speaks to the major advantages of using the web-based applications and collaboration on the web.
One really important advantage–at least I think–is that students don’t have to worry about burning assignments to disks or saving to jump drives that fail or can’t be read by school computers. Especially this week, I’ve had several students bring both to me saying they saved their projects–most e-portfolios–but the CD is empty, or the jump drive is corrupt.
If students make projects on a site such as 280 Slides or Google Page Creator, they don’t have to worry about corrupt or blank media (that means CDs and jump drives). There are just so many opportunites on the web for students to be able to do their work. We need to take advantage of them for the sake of our students.
CDs are old. Jump drives are getting there. The web is just getting newer.
A teacher walked into my office last week and asked, “What is web 2.0, anyway?” I realized that I take for granted that everyone else uses the same lingo that I do, and that I should explain that. (For instance, if I said Freddy Sanchez hit a walk-off double, most of you would have no idea what that means, but I just assume everyone knows.) So after I explained it, he said, “Well, that’s exactly how we should be teaching! That’s how my classroom is going to be next year.” Oh my gosh!! That’s equivalent to when I was teaching English and a student would say to me in the middle of Hamlet or Othello, “I never liked Shakespeare before, but now I love it!” What an awesome thing for a teacher to hear. (Of course, often the reason was, “Hamlet’s a freak.” Oh well.)
So here’s an explanation of web 2.0:
Web 2.0 refers to the part of the World Wide Web where we can collaborate and communicate with pretty much anyone in the world. Here are three different forms of explanation for you, depending on which you prefer. The third is a video I found on YouTube, the second is a slide show from Slideshare, and the first is an article from Wikipedia. By the way, all three of those sites are part of web 2.0 technologies. (If you want a “complete” list, go here.)
CLICK HERE FOR THE Wikipedia ARTICLE. (Notice you can choose any language in which to read the article once you reach the site.)
Slideshow from Slideshare (here’s the link in case the embedded presentation is blocked).
Video from YouTube. I hope this isn’t blocked for you. (Here’s the link in case you can’t see the embedded video.)
Do you need a way for your students to create electronic portfolios without the use of klunky or expensive software? Here are four links to help you and your students get started, with the added advantage that you won’t have to worry about whether the students have the software at home to work on their portfolios:
http://eportfolios.googlepages.com/howto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5osJCF909qQ
(I hope YouTube isn’t still blocked for teachers.)
Whenever my nephew and I go on a baseball vacation, we always check out the zoos and aquariums in the cities we vist, so I was pretty excited to find webcams from the National Zoo, which we both love. (I can’t wait to show him.) I’m sure you and your students will enjoy them and learn from them.
Of course, for my nephew’s generation, it’s an online world. Recently, he wanted me to see a boat that he wants to buy, so he went online, recorded a video of the boat on his cell phone, and then sent the video to me through a text message. Pretty cool, huh? But how many of us would think to do that, or even know how? Frontline has produced a show about kids like my nephew–those who have grown up online. You can watch the entire show online to learn even more about our students (and your own kids) and how they view the Internet.
This isn’t something to watch, but it’s a very thought-provoking and timely article. How far do we go to protect our students from Internet dangers? Are we restricting too much? Where do we draw the line? This article discusses that.
