Learning communities.

A couple sites have grabbed my interest. Edutopia has a headline article on creating 21st century learning communities for teachers. Somehow, that is what I am hoping we can do here at Remington. I just don't know how to nudge it into being but hoping this format might help. Any thoughts?

Secondly, this is a quote from Classroom 2.0. Looks interesting!! "PBS Teachers® and Classroom 2.0, with support from Elluminate, are partnering on a series of free monthly webinars designed to help preK-12 educators learn new ways to integrate online instructional resources in the classroom and engage students in curriculum lessons. Join us Wednesday, January 28th, at 8:00pm Eastern Time (US) for "Looking for Lincoln: Changing Views of History, Changing Views of Race" with speaker Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Join the event."

What types of web applications would you like to talk about?

The range of sources and topics is pretty broad. One site Rezed, is a source for learning and digital worlds. This includes Second Life . Second life is a site where you become an avatar or digital representation of yourself, sort of a cartoon representing you. You go through the digital world. I didn't get too far into it because it was eating time like crazy but I understand there are real banks, school and businesses that work through Second Life. I know you can go to conferences, workshops and classes, etc. That seemed a little out of range of my students. I felt the same way about Twitter, a site where you post short messages of what you are doing at any given moment. But when I read about the power of Obama Twittering during the campaign it becomes very interesting. Weblogged is a wiki, online editable database of information, written by Will Richardson, that offers much on blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. Maybe you have a topic you would like to discuss or a great website on a read-write website. Come on and jump in. We all want to know.
P.S. Russ, I didn't get back to your blog and wiki until later and want to say they are great. Love, love, love the picture and the "feel" of your blog. I subscribed. Do you find it take a lot of time?

Conversation

I think I would like this blog to evolve into a conversation with the staff of Remington and other people interested in the future of computers/the Internet and education, especially middle school education. The areas I am thinking we might discuss include "web 2.0" aka "read-write web", wikis, blogs, podcasts, Google Maps, Google Lit, integrating some or all of this into middle school classrooms.

Here is an example, I have found that a group of teachers have started a group, the Flickr Ed/Tech 365 group that take a picture a day and post them on Flikr. The pictures can be used wtihout restriction for school. They invite us all to join and use Creative Commons licensing so that everyone can share the wealth

Please reply to this post and tell me what you think about a conversation in this format and what you think about the Ed/Tech 365 project. Thanks.

Happy New Year!
I hope you had some time to relax during the past week or two. I took some time to do a little reading about kids and computers. Much of it centered around how parents can supervise, guide and monitor. This is a question with many levels. Let’s break it down.

First of all, there are many ways to monitor your children, for example, you can set parental controls on your computer and on your Internet access, similar to setting controls on you tv viewing. You can purchase a firewall to restrict certain types of content from coming up but what about IMs or text messages? There are programs that you can buy that will send you information about or copies of your child’s IMs or texts. My Mobile Watchdog or any number of spy programs, such as FlexiSPY, allow you to monitor your child. It may require a little shopping but the programs are out there.

The next question is, do you really WANT to know everything your child is doing? Where is the line? You want your child to develop independence but you want them safe and confident.

It needs to be a developmental decision, starting with close monitoring and gradually releasing control. It also needs to be clearly spelled out to the child that you are entrusting them with great responsibility. Whether any of us like it or not the current youth have much more thrust at them and therefore require greater responsibility. As parents this new era forces us to evaluate each child and each circumstance individually.