Student Protection act and what it means from the technical side

To preface, I am no lawyer, I am merely making aware notes that our teachers should consider when using social networking tools/sites in the classroom to assist in making their classroom more global and transparent.

First and foremost: Those using Facebook pages: Make sure they are open to the public. I would also send a direct link to your building administrators to make sure they are aware of the page and they too might enjoy following what goes on in your class through this medium, as well as post links on your websites so that parents can see and follow along with the information you are sharing.

Next up: Edmodo users: The very nature of Edmodo is to make private online shared classroom spaces. If you are using this tool in your class, I would see if you could set the page to public, and make sure that the building administrators have all been connected to your Edmodo class room pages. I would also offer up access to your parents by simply posting a message on your website or in a weekly mailing offering up a connection code to the pages that you are using so that they can join and see all the conversation and work being posted to the pages.

Windows Live: At the root of windows live is email. If you are using windows live in the classroom I would make a public statement about how it is used and then offer to any parent, their students username and password so that they can monitor the online conversations and file sharing that their children are participating in while using Live to enhance their learning/sharing/file storage methods while using the cloud.

The key to this act, from the technical standpoint, is to ensure the tools you are using are transparent. No private conversations should go on between anyone in a school when it comes to class work. We want to share as much of what we do as often as we can and this act helps refine and think about the tools we are using. With purpose and with the intent to develop a more global classroom should always be part of the goal when using any online tool.

Again, just my first thoughts on the act, to ensure that people are thinking about the tools they are using wisely, and to help make their extended online classroom more available to the parents, students, and administrators.

Windows Live

Last school year our school as well as the Highschool began to use Windows Live. Primarily for two reasons.

 

1. 25 GB of free data storage for every student that is accessible from any where could not be passed up

2. Moving our students into the 21st century with email access (ie direct link to their teachers outside of the classroom)

Now, within these two notes there were a plethora of other reasons why we chose to use this tool (one being that we are a PC based district and it seem the next logical step in simple tech integration for giving the students accessibility to their own work all the time at any computer.

 

This summer will be bringing the installation of Office 2010 to all PC computers in the district. A huge step up for us as we have been operating with Office 2003 for many many...many years now. That being said, I had my hopes that with 2010 and Live there would a simple means to connect  each student computer and student login to automatically or with the click of a button sync their data from their computer to their Live account, thus granting them a harmonious means to work on a computer and then have access ot that work on any computer with out having to use an external storage device.

I just happened to log in to Windows live now when I cam across a message that stated "Sync your computer with Windows Live, download the essentials pack"...Click...downloaded...install.

Time to play.

Google +

As a standard now, I have Google Chrome brought up anytime I have a laptop opened, the main reason: Google +.

Why have I found Google+ so fantastic primarily stems from that fact that I have found great conversation and connections within Google+ which is what I felt I have been missing or lacking with twitter of late.

Don't get me wrong my Twitter PLN is such a fantastic source for great ideas, new technologies, etc, but what I was missing was the conversations.  The cause of the lack of conversation is no ones fault per say.  I imagine that everyone's twitter follow list is as long or longer than mine and being constantly bombarded with great tools that you want to investigate further causes any person to spend their time just reading, so there is no time to have conversation, we are all to0 busy reading and planning how to implement what we are learning about.

Google+, in it's current infancy, has produced a concentrated version of my PLN, sure people are still posting resources, but after a single post you get conversation connected to said post. A person comments on it or adds to the source that was shared. Then I as a reader of the post and comment finds another person to add to my PLN.  Not only have I found this useful but I have also been able to ask a question and get an almost immediate response. In my early days of twitter I tried this and even tried to start a hashtag. #AskTheMasses, which never took off, I used it a couple of times and never got a single response.

Perhaps over time this may or may not change, but for now I am enjoying the simple, clean, conversation rich, platform that Google+ has offered. Never fear faithful twitter followers, I am not leaving Twitter. I like any other tech enthusiast will continue to spread myself over the newest tools that exist and find some sort of happy medium.