This week's reading in Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts not only gave me some great ideas for my classrooms, but it also reminded me of some safeguards that I, in the excitement of my students' work, forgot. I have a class doing biographies that I wanted to publish on the web using Prezi or VoiceThread, and I need to read the bios before the students publish them in order to make sure that there is no personal information in them. It's kind of depressing that our world has become one that we have to safeguard our students from unseen monsters lurking on the web, but unfortunately it has become a fact. I need to be more vigilant about this - especially since I want to have my students publish more via the Internet.
When I was reading about the podcasts, I came up with an awesome idea! Every year I have classes perform Readers' Theaters plays - mostly scripts from books that we have in the library, which helps interest the students in reading the books. What about creating a podcast of the play and publishing the podcast on our school's website? What an awesome way for parents to hear their students' perform without having to take time off of work. This is something that I am definitely going to do!
I also would like to create a blog for my Social Studies class so students can comment on a current event - first one that I post but eventually posting the events themselves, then posting comments on the events. After the reading in the book, and the reading through the blog hosting assignment, I'm starting to understand what is involved with starting a classroom blog. I've found some excellent guidelines through the Global Teacher/Student website, which detailed the steps to go through to create a classroom blog, including getting your administrator's approval, parent approval, and guidelines for students.
I have to slow myself down! I'm getting too many ideas to implement all at once (can't eat the elephant all in one bite!). The next thing I'm going to do is sit down and make a list, prioritizing the list so that when I go to create the blog or podcast (or Voicethread, for that matter!) I have all my t's crossed and i's dotted. A lot of work, but very exciting!!!!
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Denise,
ReplyDeleteI am with you on every point in your post! I feel like there is so much work in safeguarding our students that it is a bit overwhelming, but I decided to make an internet safety quiz for them and then have the student fill out a sheet about what is ok to put online and what is not. hopefully this will help my students out and keep me from spending too much time looking at all their profiles or their posts for personal info.
As for the list of prioritizing...Let me know how that goes. I started one last week and eventually had to put it away because I kept coming up with more ideas! :)
Awesome idea, Rachel! Mind it I borrow it? What a great way to help the kids to realize what they should and shouldn't share on the Internet.
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