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!

Creative Commons licenses

Wow! I love this college class I'm taking on using the Internet in the classroom. I thought I knew most everything there was about using technology and the Internet.

I was wrong.

This next couple weeks, my middle schoolers are working on a personal project in Windows Moviemaker. We've scanned in personal pictures to use for the movies but there are some students that did not have or were not able to bring in personal pictures. Because of this, I had to find some generic pictures for them to choose from. Unfortunately, it's hard to find pictures that can be used...until now.

I'm learning more about creative commons. "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright and the public domain. [http://creativecommons.org/]" Doing a Google search on creative commons pictures, I found that Flickr offers users the opportunity to share their work with a creative commons license. Read about it at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Flickr also explains the different licenses to help us understand.

So now, I can go into my classroom on Monday and teach my students about creative commons license and we can all make sure that we're following the rules.

Now I'm off to find creative commons music! Have a great day!

Photos from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gibley

My first attempt at podcasting!

I'm using Camtasia for podcasting and plan to use it for instructional videos. This has turned out to be too easy! It shocked me how easy it was. I chose Camtasia because I needed to record the screen as I teach the lesson. Not being particularly photogenic in videos, I shy away from being caught on camera. Camtasia allows me to teach a subject that can be viewed over and over as needed with just my voice in the background to go along with the mouse pointer on the screen. It does cost a pretty penny but I think it's worth every cent after seeing how easy the software is to produce my instructional videos. On YouTube and TeacherTube, you'll find many instructional videos and God bless the teachers who submit those but I won't be submitting mine. Instead, I plan to keep them within the secure walls of my organization to teach my staff. My staff members appreciate my documents giving them step-by-step instructions, so taking the instructions one step further into videos should be even more helpful, especially for my visual learners. Now I just need to practice speaking so I don't sound like I have a mouth full of rocks! ;-)

Blogging & Twittering

I'm taking a class called "Using the Internet in the Classroom". Believe it or not, I'm having a hard time keeping up. My friends joked that I should ace this class.

It's not the class that's hard...it's this stupid Internet connection I have. It should be fixed tomorrow but until then, I'll trudge along.

This post, in fact, is one of my assignments. I'd already typed in my answer to the assignment but as I hit "Publish Post", the wireless went down and took my assignment with it. I walked away so upset and tired, kicking myself for not putting it into Word and then pasting it in. (Hold on, let me open up Word and I'll be right back!)

I’ve visited many blogs pertaining to education and technology so I already knew they were out there. During this blogging assignment, I found even more. As a fairly new teacher, I’ve found useful (and very helpful) blogs on classroom management as well as Computer Lab activities. In my field of technology, I have found blogs on how to organize your school network as well as dealing with difficult people.

Twitter has been a wealth of information as well. I typed in the keyword ‘technology’ and found many tweeters who are more than happy to submit helpful tidbits on technology. Unfortunately, it was as someone once said, like “trying to drink from a firehose” so I whittled it down to a specific technology like Joomla which is a website software that I’m in the process of learning. From there I was able to pick and choose from the tweeters that looked professional and as if they knew what they were talking about.

Among the 38 tweeters I follow (and the 35 that follow me – I don’t just allow anyone to follow me), the Curriculum Director and the Technology Coordinator at Central Catholic High are my favorites because my schools collaborate with theirs. Those two folks are a great help to my staff in education as well as working with me on training our staff in technology.

This assignment hasn’t changed my mind about educational blogging or tweeting. It’s only reinforced the fact that, done correctly, blogging and tweeting about education subjects can be a lifeline for new teachers and older teachers new to technology. I’m a huge fan!