Saturday, February 16, 2008
Week 2, Thing #3
Working in a school environment poses some challenges in taking this course. Last week I discovered that most of the sites I'll be using in this class are blocked by the school District; I filled out the online form to have access to them at work, but access was denied. I can view my blog from school but not post to it. My plan is to attend the next meeting of the District's Curriculum Council and start planting the seeds for a change in their policies -- we need to catch up to where our students are if we are going to be effective in teaching students to use and evaluate information, and I'm sure I'll be exposed to some "safe" sites for using Web 2.0 in this course. I know from queries in the library every day that the students are reading and posting to blogs, and have their own pages on various social interaction sites. My reading club, the Puma Readers, are excited about the possibility of a Wiki or Blog for online book discussions between meetings, and the other LMTs in my District are interested in having our own online blog to discuss ideas, share books we're reading, and ruminate about happenings in our school District. Being knowledgeable about the specific benefits of web 2.0 will be crucial to getting approval from administrators, so I will also need to do some reading about research in this field.
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3 comments:
There are many safe ways for using wikis and blogs in the school environment. Hopefully you will be able to convince your administration and IT folks that it is possible.
Good to see you online on the Presidents Day holiday!
The more blogs and wikis become popular, the sooner the schools will offer access.
Hi Puma Librarian,
I faced the same problems in my district and I wish you better luck than I had. I was hoping the other teacher librarians would be interested enough to join my wikki, but since they could not get to it from school, they didn't see the reason to use it. I'll be watching your blog with interest to see how successful you are in changing the district policies.
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