Many people ask, how do you keep up to date with everything that is going on? Technology is always changing. Well, my answer is always quite long. I feel passionately about technology and WANT to keep up to date, it's not something that one can just hear about and wait until you know EVERYTHING about it before using it in the classroom, learn enough to keep students safe and jump right in. If you wait until you have mastered it, you will be outdated, often students if they are engaged will want to discover how it all works and be willing to share with their peers.
One thing that I do to stay up to date is follow many different blogs, when I attend a conference I will often hear of new bloggers or things to follow. One of these blogs is Global Digital Citizen Foundation. Often blogs (even like this one) allow you subscribe, because let's be honest who has time to keep checking blogs and while I know there are blog aggregates out there, you still need to VISIT the website. In an email notification you get a snippet and if it is interesting you click. This week they sent out a great article "The 3 Best Internet Safety Tips for Parents of the Digital Age"
While these tips are geared towards parents (and should be shared with parents) they can also be applied to educators. So here is my take on The 3 Best Internet Safety Tips for Educators of the Digital Age.
One thing that I do to stay up to date is follow many different blogs, when I attend a conference I will often hear of new bloggers or things to follow. One of these blogs is Global Digital Citizen Foundation. Often blogs (even like this one) allow you subscribe, because let's be honest who has time to keep checking blogs and while I know there are blog aggregates out there, you still need to VISIT the website. In an email notification you get a snippet and if it is interesting you click. This week they sent out a great article "The 3 Best Internet Safety Tips for Parents of the Digital Age"
While these tips are geared towards parents (and should be shared with parents) they can also be applied to educators. So here is my take on The 3 Best Internet Safety Tips for Educators of the Digital Age.
1) Informed
We as educators need to have a balanced view of technology both in perceptions and use. Like everything there are positives and negatives, while we may be SUPER excited to use a new technology tool we need to look at the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to make sure that if we are directing students to it that they are going to be protected. To stay up to date I will often do a Ctrl+F search with the keywords "parents" "permission" "age" to ensure that I am keeping students safe. This also means that we can't focus on the negative aspect in technology, we need to set clear expectations of what we want students to be doing and discuss the possible ramifications if they are not behaving in a positive way (just like in the classroom). Social media is case and point in this, it can be an AMAZING crowd sourcing tool, students can make connections that they would not normally make, but if they or someone else is making a poor choice they need to have the tools of how to handle it.2)Interested
Be interested in what students are doing with technology in other classes. Can you piggyback off of someone else's idea and use the groundwork that they have established? Many staff members have been using Quizlet to create online flashcards. It has multiple games that students can use to practice terminology. Students can practice without signing in or if you have permission they can log in and you can monitor their use.3)In View
There are now many different software out there to monitor students and keep them safe in the classroom. PASD pays for this service through GoGuardian. In the past staff have had students put their back to the teacher so that they could see screens. We need to be aware of what students are doing on the devices that we supply to them when they are in our care.
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