My daughter is learning to read to just like every other first grader our there.  As a mom, this is my first time going through this experience since most of my teaching career has been in the secondary grades.  So I’ve decided to help her the only way I know how and that involves using technology.  Maddie has had her own blog since she was two years old and I have used that to document her journey overseas for family and friends.  Over the past couple of years, she has been using her owncamera to take pictures for the blog.  We then sit down together and talk about what she wants to say and I type away as she chatters on and on about her life.  Now that she is beginning to learn how to read and write though, she is able to take a more active role in her own blog.

Maddie is the youngest child in her class and needs a bit of a boost with her reading.  By introducing the technology component, I am hoping to answer some of these questions over the next couple of months:

• How does recording herself reading stories and listening to herself impact her reading fluency and comprehension?
• How does listening to pre-recorded stories that I have made for her on her iPod impact her reading development?
• How does her attitude toward reading change by using technology to enhance her development?

Maddie opened up iMovie on her own yesterday after school and recorded herself reading a Birds’ Feet.  She then exported the file to Quicktime after her first take.  She took herself very seriously and really only needed help getting the movie on YouTube so that she could put it on her blog.  When we talked about what she had done by reading and listening to herself, this is what she found:

1. Maddie said the title correctly the second time because she knew that she was being recorded.  She herself said that she would’ve just let the mistake stand if she had not been recording herself.
2. Maddie stayed engaged throughout the entire process of opening up iMovie, recording herself, exporting the movie, putting it on YouTube, logging into her blog and writing the blog post.  She extended her time on task.
3. After listening to her movie, Maddie made connections by remembering photos of me with a parrot when I was younger.
4. Maddie was proud of herself and showed confidence in what she was reading.
5. Maddie typed her own sentences in the blog post instead of asking me to type for her.

I am hoping that the self evaluation and reflection process is the cornerstone to learning reading for my six year old.  As educators, we build reflection time for our students to enhance their learning.  As a mom, I believe the self reflection process will give my child the confidence to encourage her reading development.

Maddie’s actual blog post is here.

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Over the course of the next couple of days at my school we are requiring that all students in the 1:1 laptop program permanently change their computer settings.  As a school we are going to require that each and every student in the 7th and 8th grade have their Remote Login and Remote Management boxes checked under their system preferences on their computers.

This will enable us as a school to better monitor student activity and help guide appropriate student behavior while the students are on campus through Apple Remote Desktop.  They have been informed: If a student changes their settings it will be considered a discipline issue.

You see, we gave our students administrative rights to their machines.  With administrative rights, the students can install programs they may need, update their software on their own (so very important), and really make this dynamic learning tool their own.

We are in our second month of our 1:1 laptop program and it’s going very well.  Teachers are modifying the way they teach and following many of the recommendations they received during their Out in Shanghai days training.   And as Jason Ohler found in his most recent research, the student engagement in educational activities is through the roof.  Quite frankly, students don’t have time to get into trouble with their computers while in the classrooms.

So why are we as a school doing this?  I am still trying to come up to the answer to this question and I’ll diligently gather my research over the coming months.  The jury is still out for me though.  I don’t want this to be a “gotcha” program because I think that without student input it could erode the positive culture and relationship that currently exists between teachers and students.  However, I am not ignorant and I know that there is always one… one student that cyber-bullies another without an adult knowing about it… one student that secretly chats with a friend back home on Facebook while she should be working on her talking worksheet in science class… one student that skips lunch to play Halo on a regular basis, avoiding conversation with friends and exercise for the soul.

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There are nearly 400 students in my middle school and I’ve gone and created a student blog for every single one of them.  Some of the students blogged last year for the first time and, overall, they did a great job.  As I was browsing some of the work they put up on their blogs, I realized that there was a strong need for students to be educated about Online Profiles.  Thanks to some of Jeff Utecht’s and Julie Lindsay’s work, I’ve been able to pull together some of the best of the best messages you can send out to kids.  I didn’t preach – I just told them a story and I told it the way it is…

I started the 40 minute introductory presentation off with a simple question – who has a Facebook or MySpace account?  I was amazed that I had a few 6th graders that claimed they have had their Facebook account for three years which meant that they have been leaving their internet stamp since they were 9 years old.  We talked a lot about the Connected Web and I showed them the difference between a young blog and a blog that had been around for awhile using this Websites as Graphs applet.  The visual helped students begin to see that they truly cannot control where information goes via the web.

I asked the two questions of the students:  

1. What do you want people to know?  
2. What do you not want people to know?

 This framed our conversation around recent articles where people landed jobs because of who and what they knew through their online social network.  But we also talked about some of the negatives of an online profile.  The question came up:  Can teachers find out what we have our Facebook page?  I cited at least two instances where this is exactly what happened.  

Most students will set up their blogs next week and I want them thinking about the true meaning of Digital Citizenship and I want them to be fastidious about Creating their Online Profile.  They can’t control it, but they can form it and create it.  Digital Literacy is part of creating their online profile.  I asked my group of Third Culture Kids from each grade level if they know of Joe Biden.  Most did, but most did not know that he was accused of plagiarizing a speech in 1987 and that little piece of news was still following him today over 20 years later.  This was yet another reason students should form, shape and create their online profile today.  

I presented to the three grade levels at three different assemblies and I had them engaged the entire time…. they are thinking about it because all this week, students stop me in the halls and during lunch to talk about what is okay to put on the web and what is not okay.  Their awareness level has risen.  What a great start for the school year!  

My presentation is below in pdf because it’s a Keynote.  The movies didn’t come through as a pdf so they are linked here:  

1. Disney Copyright Law

2. Plagiarism: Don’t Do It

3. Cyberbulling – Ad Council

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