In my "Internet for Classroom Use" assignment this week, I am to write about several of the most significant challenges I face when using the Internet in my classroom. This should be easy since I’m the computer teacher and ALL my students have access to the Internet.

As you’ve read in my blog before, safety is a huge factor with the students using the Internet in my classroom. Our school policy does not allow students to give out their email addresses or to check personal email, but they’ll do that as soon as my back is turned. Or worse, they’ll give out a parent or friend’s email to sign up for a game website. I try to control this by always walking around and being present. I start the school year with discussions about Internet safety. The main website I use is NetSmartz which is very informative and helpful. My instructor suggested some other sites such as WebAware and SafeKids which I welcome. We can never have enough resources for student safety.

Even still, I have students as young as third grade with a MySpace account. It boggles my mind. Some eighth grade students applying for entrance to a prestigious high school have MySpace accounts that show someone that I would not want at my high school. I talk to the class as a whole about the image they portray on their profiles as well as what people think when they see these images. I also pull the students aside who have offending MySpace accounts and ask them to look at their profile from the point of view of the person determining whether they are granted entrance to the high school. I hope it works.

When I have assignments that don’t involve the Internet, a few students will sneak online or just go online and act like they misunderstood me when I ask them why they’re online. I’ve been known to unhook the Internet in my Computer Lab during that class session to help the students stay on task.

In research projects, many of my students just want to print out material they find on the Internet, killing a few trees in the process or they want to copy and paste and say that they’re finished. I try to convey the importance of using your own words instead of copying. I bring up discussions of how plagiarism has affected the career of Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Ambrose, for one, and how plagiarism is basically cheating. I hope the discussions make a difference.

Most of these challenges involve much patience and discussion as well as rejection of student work that isn’t really student work.

For the most part, however, I feel privileged that my students have access to computers with access to the Internet and the opportunities it offers to them. I hear ‘horror’ stories of schools with old dinosaur computers that have no access to the Internet and think of how handicapped those schools are in this day and age. Yes, we have to protect our students but schools should also make sure that their students have access to beneficial information and interactive applications that only the Internet can provide.

Meet Tammy!

At today's Tech Conference, I met the most fascinating instructor. Apparently, many other attendees thought she was fascinating as well because her classes were overflowing.

She looks like Meryl Streep and had the greatest ideas on how to use technology in the classroom. Check out her website here: www.tammyworcester.com
Easy to remember...like the steak sauce without the "shire". ;-)

Make sure to check out her Copyright and Permissions page before borrowing any of her work, but definitely try out her tips; specifically the training worksheets from this week's conference. She's got a wealth of them!

Enjoy!

Tag Clouds

Ever heard of a tag cloud? Chances are that you've seen one on the web and thought "well that is a cool visual!"

A tag cloud (aka text cloud) takes a bit of text (for my example, I'm using my entire blog) and chooses words that are used frequently. The more frequent that you see the word in the text, the larger the word appears.

I googled "tag clouds" to find out how to build one of these cool contraptions and found a couple website that would help. TagCrowd.com was one.

Check it out! As you can see, "technology" is the most used word in my blog (duh!).

Surf on over to TagCrowd and make one of your own!

able admin assignment away blogging class classroom com comments commons coordinator creative duty easy education flickr follow found helpful http instructions internet learning moodle personal pictures plus pm podcasting posted recommend safety school search secure staff students teach teachers tech techie technology tools tweeters videos web website week work www

created at TagCrowd.com

Web 2.0

New technology is coming at us at such a high rate. It is so overwhelming even to a techie like me...well, elementary techie like me. This can be a good thing though. There's so many resources at the touch of our keyboard to help in our job as well as to educate us.

This last week, our instructor introduced us to http://www.go2web20.net/ where you can search for Web 2.0 tools. I searched under "education technology" but found nothing. Then I searched "technology coordinator" and, again, found nothing. Trial and error. Techies are patient. I then stopped to take a look at our instructor's instructions and chose to look for "e-learning". Bam! Lots of results.

Right away, I found a website titled "Game Classroom" at http://www.gameclassroom.com. Now this is a website that I would recommend to my teachers to use on their Smartboards with their students. I wouldn't recommend it for the students to use alone because it's ad intensive but for fun learning games, it looks to be valuable information.

Another search on "websites" gave a plethora of website building websites (say that three times really fast!) and led me to some possibly helpful sites. I'm in the process of building websites for my schools and the easier, the better! One that caught my eye was Web.com at http://www.webs.com/. I'll have to try it out later to see how easy it would be to use for our school websites.

Check out http://www.go2web20.net/ for yourself and see what you can learn today!