Online Conversations - unravelling the thread

Participating in a conversation online can quickly become a tangled skein - or a colourful tapestry - depending on the mood the reader is in. I became personally aware of this after my last post when some people commented on the post by leaving a comment in the traditional sense, some sent me their thoughts as public tweets or direct messages, I got a couple of emails, a couple of iChat conversations, a text, a phone call and even some face to face feedback. Oh, and someone notified me they had started a new thread on a Ning in response. Wouldn't it be more fun/enlightening if the whole conversation took place in the same place eg in the comments following?
Being old fashioned I was tempted to copy/paste the other feedback and ideas I had received into the comments under that post, but I was unsure of the netiquette surrounding this. Is that bad form if someone has texted/Facebooked/emailed or DMd? I would really like to know.
I do know that this is where Web 2 currently is at and hyperlinking rulz, but aren't we are all too busy to be trawling several online spaces to participate fully in a conversation?
If you have any ideas about this (or know the rules) please leave them below ;)

Future proofing our Web 2 students

ERO is only a few days away so I am still mulling over the internet policies that we have in place. I appreciate the contributions from Myles, Suzie, Allanah, Stephanie, Luke and Debbie to my thinking from my last post. I am completely in agreement with those who pointed out that our students' greatest threat to online safety comes from those who they know, and that the 'stranger danger' predator kind of threat is the least likely, despite what some adults and media persist in promoting. I have seen first hand the damage teenagers can inflict on each other during 'Bebo Wars' and one doesn't need to go further than some of the issues raised in Growing up Online to realise that some of the greatest dangers online to our students come from themselves and their peers.
So it is this kind of social danger that is at the forefront of my mind as I continue to ponder how schools are really placed to provide safety for our students online. One of the things I have been searching for is how schools are responding to questions about future-proofing the safety of their students - and I haven't found any examples of policies relating to this. You may think that it is sufficient to be responsible for their current safety without worrying about the future! Yet I see teachers across the globe happily posting photos, podcasts and videos of their students online, secure in that they are following their school's policies and have parent permission for this. I am sure that, like my school, they have gained parent permission and have procedures in place to ensure they are acting responsibly.
What I am wondering is, what happens to these images/videos/etc in the future? When the student graduates from the class, or the teacher leaves the school, or in 10 years time....? Are the abandoned blogs still open for comment? Are the videos (and their comments) on YouTube still being monitored? Are those Flickr photos still able to be linked to? What happens when a 16 year old student no longer thinks the stuff her teacher allowed to be posted when she was 9 is cute anymore, but it is still online, and is now being downloaded or linked to by peers in an unkind way. Who do you appeal to to take it down? Who holds the passwords to these online spaces that teachers in 2009 thought were such wonderful ways to engage students in 21st century learning?
Are you and your schools talking about this? What have you decided to do to future proof your students' Web 2 experience? Who holds the passwords to the accounts where other peoples' kids are being published online? What happens when teachers leave the school or change classes? The answer is simple for those of you who work in schools which either don't allow publishing students online OR who do it inside a passworded, and protected from the public, 'walled garden'.

I would be very interested in hearing how those of you who are currently publishing student material out there in the world wide web are future-proofing those 'time capsules' you are happily publishing today?

Keeping our students safe online?

"Are we really responsible for keeping our students safe online?" is the title I was after but it seemed too long for a blog post!
In the last couple of weeks I have been doing a bit more thinking about keeping students safe online and consequently wondering about the meaning of the safety nets we have put in place. I think that safety net policies were great back in the day when most things we were keeping our kids safe from were made of solid materials, but the online environment is fluid and there is no way that schools should really be held responsible for students' safety. The safety nets we put in place have gaping holes.
It is not just the imminent arrival of the Education Review Office (ERO) to the school that has me looking again at the school policies relating to cybersafety - though with eLearning as one of the areas they will be reviewing it probably is a smart idea. It was the 9.05 minutes of fame on TV One that really got me started. It reminded me that schools are obliged to have rigourous safety policies in place to protect our students identity online, but there are at least two other groups who seem to live on a plane above us and can do anything they like; the traditional mass media and the paparazzi media.
Our school policies include all the basics advised by the Netsafe group when we publish online or "celebrate children’s achievement" as they phrase it. With parent permission we publish first names only, tasteful photos, no addresses, no phone numbers etc. However in our experience with the mass media they are able to completely ignore this. National television, The NZ Herald and Metro magazine are examples which come to mind where the reporters involved have blithely waved away our offers of obtaining parent permission as 'we don't need it'. These same media are also comfortable publishing students full names. Incase any of you are forgetting, these media publications end up online as clicking any of the links above will confirm.
At the other end of the spectrum we have paparazzi publishings of our students online (and I am aware I am using the term loosely here). We are all aware of issues surrounding students publishing images and movies of each other on Bebo, but we also encounter parents publishing images of other people's children in spaces like YouTube, as well as Bebo, Facebook, Flickr etc. in seemingly harmless contexts. Parents with cameras at sports events, culture events, school productions or even school assemblies all contribute to this paparazzi media who upload whatever they feel like and attach as much information as they choose to the images - about other people's children as well as their own.
Another group of paparazzi publishers I have become aware of recently are the teachers who pass through our school in groups receiving professional development. As part of their visits we usually invite them into the classrooms to observe teachers and students carrying out whatever it is they have been receiving PD on. Often these visitors are slinging cameras and we presumed they were capturing images to jog their memories when they got back to their own schools and were trying to synthesise what they had been learning. Over the last six months (we may be slow observers here) our Google alerts have made us aware that some of these educators are posting our students and teachers images online - without alerting us or obtaining consent - in spaces as diverse as slideshares, teachertube, YouTube, Flickr etc.
Hence I am beginning to feel that our school online safety net in the middle is very porous and that our approach is at times pretty ineffectual.
Fortunately we are a primary school so we seldom have problems with our own students acting as paparazzi media as can happen in schools with older students.
I would be very interested in hearing thoughts from anyone else who has been pondering this. And how effective would you say that your student cybersafety is to ERO in 3 weeks time?

Some of our students photographed these visitors looking at them! These are probably not ones who published photos of our students online!

Literacy Cycle

The concept of a Literacy Cycle to describe what is happening when eLearning is being fully integrated with the teaching of English began in 2007 at Pt England School when we were researching the impact of Podcasting with KPE on student learning outcomes in English. I was observing what was happening in the classrooms and met with teachers involved and together we co-constructed the idea of a literacy cycle to visually describe the process occuring. This was very much a work in progress and evolved as the teachers, particularly Sandy Lagitupu, provided feedback on what worked and how the Literacy Cycle could be improved to reflect actual practice.
We were quite over explaining to people that 'this is NOT an ICT project, this is a literacy project - a 21st century way of doing literacy!" There is no way that we are talking about throwing out effective practice that teachers have developed for the teaching and learning of literacy. We are simply saying that by using 21st century tools we can extend the value of the teaching, continue the learning beyond the completion of an exercise AND hope to hook kids into enjoying 'traditional' literacies. So we began looking at a way of depicting graphically what was happening in the classroom.The Literacy Cycle for podcasting with KPE as it is currently being used in Sandy's classroom is shown above.
English as it has been taught for centuries in many schools has been a linear process. For example, teaching writing progressed something like the diagram to the left. The key point of difference with the linear approach is that when the outcomes of the lesson are published ( and this may be by rewriting a 'good' copy, typing it up and stapling it to display on the wall or even publishing it on the school television programme) the book is shut, the print out dangles on the wall or the TV is turned off. That piece of learning concludes and we move on.

The Literacy Cycle concept has emerged from the opportunities offered by Web 2. We still desperately need quality English/Literacy teaching occuring in our schools as the foundation. But 21st Century students need opportunities to do something with the learning outcomes in their own language ie turn them into a digital learning object that they have created; a movie, an animation, a podcast, a funky slideshow etc. And then this digital learning object (DLO) can be shared online in a Web 2 environment where it can live on and on and on.... And it is here that more opportunities for engaging students in literacy learning can occur, through the threaded conversations and reflections posted in the associated comments.

In 2008 twelve teachers across the seven schools in our EHSAS cluster developed Literacy Cycles around the projects they were embarking on for Manaiakalani. The students involved ranged from 5 year olds to teenagers at high school. The project range is equally diverse. Each teacher identified the 'hook' they would be using with their students to motivate them and this is placed in the centre of the cycle (as can be seen in the movie below). The Literacy Cycles have brought coherence to a number of teachers who have previously struggled to clarify the convergence of eLearning and English without creating a whole new programme, and certainly without any suggestion of dispensing with researched and proven methods for teaching the foundations.
The projects mentioned above are being researched over a three year period and the interim findings of 2008 have been shown to us this week. In short, the students have continued to make progress. In fact a number of the projects have seen progress beyond the expected national norms. But of at least equal importance, a large group of students have had genuine 21st century learning experiences for at least one year and have become excited about their learning! More about this in another post...
We are very happy for the Literacy Cycle concept to be used by others who find it helpful. We would appreciate acknowledgement where appropriate that it began with the KPE podcast and Pt England School and has been further developed by the teachers of the Manaiakalani schools.

Twitter and Feedjit - let our powers combine!

There has been a bit of discussion online in the last 12 months about how to use Twitter in the classroom (presuming it is seen as a worthwhile education tool) and none of the suggestions I have read about have triggered any 'aha' response with me yet. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with what some people are doing, just that none of them have meshed with our situation. In the first week back at school for the 2009 year I had the opportunity to facilitate a powerful learning moment with some young students and their teacher. This teacher is starting out in her first ever teaching position with a class of 6 and 7 year olds in a school that has not embedded eLearning in a major way. So the kids in this class were real newbies in the Web 2 environment. The teacher set up a class blog and on their first day of school they co-created the first post and published it. It can be very mystifying to adults, let alone young students, as to 'why you would do this' and 'is there any possiblity it will even be read', amidst the millions of pages of exciting content available online. I had advised her to incorporate a Feedjit gadget into the sidebar of her blog as she was setting it up, to demonstrate to the students and parents that publishing in this way meant that their work had a chance of being read by people around the world. The authentic audience factor again! Of course this can back-fire miserably if you open your blog page with the kids and see that the only red dot on the map of the whole world is languishing in the bottom right hand corner on Auckland, New Zealand - and that visitor was probably your Mum! The next day I had a brainwave! I have often seen people on Twitter ask their network for a shout-out so they can demonstrate to their mates/their conference attendees/their boss how many people love them and follow their 140 character pearls of wisdom. This must make these adults feel great when they get the responses flooding in and presumably supports their objectives. I wondered if my Twitter network would respond in a similar way to support these kids and their fledgling blogging project. From this evolved the idea of combining the powers of Twitter and Feedjit. At 10 am the next morning, while the students were in class with their blog open to "FeedjitLive - Arrivals as they happen", I tweeted asking my network to simply click on the blog URL I supplied so the kids could see where in the world they came from. It was a bit of a challenge explaining the request on Twitter in 140 characters, and in class the students weren't told anything specific about Twitter. Well, the Twitter network came up trumps! The kids were simply wowed by watching the visual demonstration of 50+ people from around the world landing on their blog in the space of an hour. And some of those visitors (without having been asked) took an extra couple of minutes to leave a comment for the kids as they passed through. How cool is that for newbie bloggers? I'll paste a few of the comments the students wrote on their blog after this experience....

Dear visitors, Thank you for the lovely comments on our blog. Please keep on doing it because I like seeing the comments from different countries. From A

Dear Mum and Dad, Thank you for doing comments, you are now a commenter! Have you seen all the red dots there are on the map? It's so cool because people from overseas have seen our blog. I love being in Room 10.

Love from S.

Dear commenters, Thank you for commenting on our blog, thats very nice of you. I feel proud of me and the class. I like my blog. It is awesome. From X.

Thank you to all of you who responded to my tweet and provided a fun learning opportunity for some Year 3 kids and their beginning teacher. Their map went from only having visitors from Auckland to what you see on the left in an hour
Kia ora.

Download the pdf of the Feedjitlive screen after one hour