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.

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.