Visiting some grade 6 bloggers

About 6 weeks ago I spent some time with three teachers in our district to talk about the ways in which student blogging might used to improve written output. Last week I visited one of the classes and talked with the students and their teacher about the experience to date. We also looked at some other student blogs and discussed what the characteristics of a good comment are.

I did an impromptu interview of some students, walking around the room with my microphone equipped iPod.

I left the raw .wav file with the teacher and he turned it into a What we learn from blogging podcast posted on his weekly blog update to parents.

If you were going to tell these students what you have learned from blogging, what would you say?

Stop Cyberbullying - My Story

Cyberbullying, is an electronic way for the bully to operate. Whether the action is true bullying, defined by the infliction of wilfull and repeated harm, or bully behaviour, actions that are bully like, without the repetition involved, it is wrong. And, we need to teach our students about this form of bully behaviour and the actions to take if they become the subjects of this type of behaviour.

Three years ago, when I was still a school principal, I was at a PAC meeting. Following the meeting I logged in to my school mail in order to send a note to the prinicipal of the high school regarding something our PAC wanted to do. There was new mail in my mailbox and the mail had come from two different accounts. It was filled with vile statements as well as threats to me of harm and wishes that I would die. Some of the messages suggested sexual comments and suggestions. Another horrible piece to this action was that my school secretary was copied. I was able to log in as her and open her mailbox to find a slew of messages, some that were the copies of my messages and others that were directed to her alone. I contacted the police and our district technology manager (the position I hold today).

Later that night and early the next morning, more messages were sent.

Because I have internet skills that go beyond reading and writing email, I knew where to look for information about who might have sent the message. Looking in the message headers, I could identify the IP addressess of the senders computers. The two ISPS involved were contacted. They promised to look in to the issue and see what they could do. In the meantime, I copied all the messges into a folder, on both our machines, and printed them out. I also talked with my secretary, telling her that there was some inappropriate mail on her desktop and not to view it.

Later in the afternoon, a husband and wife arrived at school and asked to see me. Once in my office, the dad broke into tears. He had been called by the ISP and told that his computer had been used to send hate mail. He was devastated and asked for my forgiveness. A half hour later, another mom came to see me, equally horrified that her son had been involved in this attack.

Working with the police, the boys were charged, but I agreed to holding a healing circle. All parties who were affected by the event, including my Superintendent as he knew how the event was affecting me in doing my job, came to the table for a meeting. The end result was that I proposed that rather than the students being suspended long term from the school, that they be required to take a three evening course, attended by their parents as well, to learn about internet safety and internet etiquette.
Though forgiven, the event is indellibly etched in my mind. It is one of the reasons why I do today what I do... talk to kids about cyberbullying and other forms of internet misuse.

Talks with the local police indicate that there is little in the way of abuse reported. Please encourage your children to report these kinds of abuses.

Cyberbullying must be slowed to a stop.

Image Credit: Flickr photo from Rich James - http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjames/439136155/

Technorati Tags: stopcyberbullying

Raising awareness about cyberbullying

Wes Fryer reported in one of his blog entries today, Cyberbullying and Death Threats a link to a blog entry by Kathy Sierra her recounting of how she has been bullied and harrassed in an organized attack over the past four weeks. Follow this link to read more, but be aware, the content is graphic.

A number of prominent bloggers are working hard to spread the idea that this Friday, March 30, should be a day for all bloggers to recognize the need to Stop Cyberbullying.

I work with many students and speak to parents about cyberbullying and I plan to recognize this day and support the idea in my blog post on Friday. Reading Kathy's account of the threats made against her and the fear she has of not only continuing to blog, but to even step out of her home has me thinking even harder about how to get the message of ethical use of the internet across to my students.

If you are a blogger who reads this, I would encourage you to follow the links and join this effort on Friday.

>stopcyberbullying

Technorati Tags: stopcyberbullying

Eddie's Rainbow of Thoughts

Eddie, a grade 5 student who blogs, created this inspiration or kidspiration document to show graphically his thoughts about blogging.

If you want to read more from Eddie, go to: Eddie's Rainbow of Thoughts.

He has an interesting style and I will be using his blog as an example for the elementary teachers I want to encourage to incorporate blogging into their classes.

A teacher uses the computer as a tool

I had no sooner read David Warlick's blog post titled Are computer's a tool? when I discovered a series of sites developed by a math teacher doing just that.

Darren Kuropatwa is a senior math teacher at a high school in Winnipeg Manitoba. He has been using Web2.0 tools to support his instruction.

His main blogsite is: A Difference. This appears to be his primary reflection site where he talks about the use of software and hardware tools (such as the SmartBoard) during and following his class.

He has a podcast site set up at: MathCast Central. This site is created using iWeb and the files are stored on his school district server. The servers we have at our highschools and at our tech office could host a site like this. What you discover by going to this page is his experimental work with one of his classes that he records on a daily basis as a podcast for later review by his students or other interested parties. He has had some challenges with this work, and it is interesting to hear how he is working through this.

His class blog is: Pre-Cal 40S (Winter '07). I find this really cool. He has the students in his classroom as partners in this blog, each having the permissions to make postings. I've seen this done before, but what I find most interesting with Darren's implementation is that he has students assigned the task of scribing the class, taking images from the SmartBoard, and posting a daily summary of each class.

Very cool. I'd like to review these pages with some of our teachers to see if there is interest in a similar project that I could support from the corner of my office.

A new superintendent

Our school board has appointed a new superintendent for next year. Our current super is retiring after giving the district 32 years of service as a teacher, school administrator, assistant superintendent, and superintendent. He will be missed by many and his replacement will soon put her own stamp on the district and its operations. I had an opportunity today to interview her about some of her observations on her new challenge.

Click here to listen to the Podcast as an MP3 file.

Helijet to Victoria

I flew to Victoria yesterday to participate in two presentations dealing with NWEA and assesment strategies. It was a productive day for me as I think I was able to communicate some of my thoughts about the difference between the Foundations Skills Assessment (primarily a summative tool in my mind) and the Northwest Evaluation Association assessment tool which I see as a formative tool for teachers to use.

Rather than write more about that, I'll treat you to some photos I took on the way over to Victoria and back.

Safe Blogging

I've written before about how scary it is for me to view some elementary school student blogs. David Warlick writes in his blog today about the keynote address to the NCAECT conference delivered by Will Richardson. In his discussion about how students learn from the blogging they do and the comments reflected back to them by their readers, David reports:

Kids understand this in a personal way. They do not understand it as a life-long learning skill. It’s a personal living skill. MySpace is where they go to learn, and it is not going away. Will pulls up a MySpace account maintained by a young woman, and it is very much a glamor site — highly suggestive images. Will compellingly makes the case that this young woman has put an enormous amount of time into maintaining her site. Several educators are murmuring about the dangers and how she is making inapproproate use of her site. I want to say, “She’s expressing herself exactly the way that our culture has taught her to express herself.” Just watch TV!

Although this may help to explain why children blog on sites such as Piczo the way they do, it remains important for us as educators who work with students and encourage them to use the blog as a communications device to teach them the skills necessary to do this in a socially acceptable manner.

New take on an old joke

1993 CBC Report

I was a partner at Advantage Computers, an Apple reseller in British Columbia. I recall in the early 1990s when our lead graphics technologist, Paolo Bertoia, came to tell me what he was learning about the World Wide Web, something he thought was pretty cool and something that being used by academics, researchers, and scientists around the world giving them a new way of communicating. It was quite fascinating and I since I already had a history using email and newsreaders, it was only natural that I started to explore the web.
Tonight I ran across this video on YouTube which is a news report that ran on the CBC, the National Broadcasting company in Canada. As I work with Junior High students, it amazes me that some of them were born in 1993. I wonder if any new technologies were reported in on 1950 when I was born.

High stakes or not, it's meaningless testing

In British Columbia our grades 4 and 7 students will be subjected to the Foundation Skills Assessment to be held in May. This test (I won't call it an assessment) is designed to test the understanding of the curriculum taught to date by the students in these grades.

In his I Need to Vent blog entry, Mr. Sherman describes the high stakes testing environment in his state of Illinois and the administrative and school disruptive nightmare this test brings to his school.

I commented to his posting as follows:

British Columbia has an annual assessment of students in grades 4 and 7 in May and although it is not as high stakes as yours in the US are, they are quite frustrating for teachers and administrators. The issues you note above re the rigmarole related to the administration of the assessments apply here too.

Our results do come back earlier than yours, however they are largely meaningless. A student is deemed to be "not within", "within", or "exceeding" expectations. No item analysis, no clear understanding of what a student needs to learn to improve.

Of course a right-wing think tank, the Fraser Institute, rates schools by the percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations and whether schools improve or decline from year to year. The so called growth or decline is bogus since the year to year data does not apply to cohort groups. I could go on, but I think you get my drift.

I was directed by another blog I read today to an Edutopia article which urges us to teach children to appreciate their brains.

POC - Principal on Call

One of the fun things I get to do in this semi-retirement of mine is fill in for some principals when they are away. Today I got to go to a school where I last was the principal 7 years ago. This isn't my first time back, but today was fairly typical of the days I used to spend there. Here is my note to the principal to summarize the day.

It was a great day today at *******!

Had fun with the morning announcements. You might like to announce tommorow that no one was the winner of the IPod Video for correctly identifying two things that Al Pacino, Tiger Woods, Hans Christian Anderson, and Robin Williams have in common. Mr. Cotter says, "Better luck with your research next time!"

***** spent a bit of time with me first thing this morning. He had a bit of a run in with ******* so we worked on Math and chatted about situational behaviour. I think he learned a bit of math from me, hopefully a bit of the other rubbed off too. He was back in class after recess and I touched bases with both *** and *** at lunch. His afternoon went fine too. No follow up required.

*** came to me just before school with a "scratch in his throat from something he smelled outside". I gave him a drink of water and it magically went away. At recess he wasn't sure water would work again, and sure enough, it didn't. He wanted to talk with mom so I phoned ****, explained the situation, and she gave him some TLC over the phone. He came back again at lunch and I showed him some pictures from the internet of a boy with swollen glands and told him that was what was wrong with him ... or that, like me, he had a sore throat. A brief chat with mom again. Later on he laid down in the medical room and went to sleep. I better check to see if he has gone home! Nice little guy.

Enjoyed the warm sun outside at recess, it clouded over a bit... a few very minor, "he said, she said", "they're spying on us, no they are"... all resolved without any undue pain. I forgot to tell you about the kids the other day who came to tell me about some others who were near the teacher's desk and they weren't supposed to be. I asked them if they told the other kids that and to move away. They said they did and the others moved, but that they had been punished for that before and thought I might like to punish these new transgressors... love grade 1s.

I covered for **** for about 40 minutes in the afternoon so she could meet with **** the specialist you have visiting. Great fun working with those kids and their literacy projects.

Did a bit of work with ****'s group, I recorded them doing some audio in GarageBand, and vistited all the classrooms at some time or other.

Taught ***** (the admin assistant) a couple of new tricks... she's a keeper.

Hope you had a good day.

And the day was over almost as fast as it started. Of course, I got away without paperwork, parent conferences, meetings, etc. But, that is why I am semi-retired.

Learning On-Line

I've just enrolled in an on-line learning course designed to explore and use the tools available on the Google site. I know that Blogger is one of these tools and that is what attracted me to the class... that and finding out more about the Google Apps I might be able to introduce to staff and students.

I created a small webpage: http://bobsd46.googlepages.com/home with the Pages tool. It is a pretty simple tool to use and I think it might have some promise for using with students in the intermediate grades. I think I have just the group of students in mind to try this with.

It only takes one

On Friday I was working with some students talking with them about internet safety and presenting some scenarios to them regarding passwords and disclosure of personal information. With one group of grade 5 and 6s I let them know that I had visited their PICZO sites and they were surprised by that. It confirmed my belief that many students do not realize how public the web is and the tracks they leave behind for others to follow.

Just before the end of the day, one boy came to me to say thanks for bringing this forward. He had recently been "featured" on a boy of the month page and his picture had been posted their without his permission. Both complimentary and uncomplimentary things had been said about him on this page. He was able to talk to the author of the page and let her know how he felt about this. She apologized and said that she would remove the page that night.

It takes only one event like this to make me feel good about a day of workshops with kids.