Today was the first day back at school for teachers in Victorian Government Schools. All schools are spending the first three days on professional development and planning. This year my school is focussing on in-house professional development. Each Monday night teachers will be presenting on Literacy, Numeracy and ICT. I am in charge of ICT […]
Digital Citizenship
Tech Tools for Teachers #22 PrimaryPad
Each week Simon Collier and I collaborate on an email newsletter for teachers called Tech Tools for Teachers. Click here to find an archive of past newsletters and to subscribe. This week we review the site PrimaryPad http://primarypad.com/ PrimaryPad is a tool that allows students and teachers to collaborate on a word-processor style document. Despite […]
Social Media Monitoring
Last week I posted about Denis Masseni’s report “Why Schools are Spooked by Social Media.” An interesting component of this report was on social media monitoring. That is, monitoring the internet for mentions of a particular keyword (such as your school). This is a good way to take defensive action if negative mentions occur and […]
Why Schools are Spooked by Social Media
I was pleased I was listening to ABC Radio Melbourne this morning when I heard the next segment was going to be about social media in schools. While I braced myself for a flood of ill informed callers harping on the negatives of Facebook and the like I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome. Denis […]
Why I think Blogs Should be Public
I have had a number of educators have asked me in the past about my privacy guidelines for my class blog. Recently, an educator contacted me for advice when their principal would not allow their class blog to be public. That is, the principal would not allow blogging unless the blog was completely password protected. […]
Cyber Safety and Young Students
Want to explore some more current resources about cyber safety and digital citizenship? Check out my page with new resources for teachers, schools, students, and parents. Teaching about cyber safety is an important aspect of all technology teaching. With my Grade Two students, I try to discuss aspects of cyber safety while using the internet […]