Lisa's recent post announced her participation in 140 Character Conference in NYC. A champion for meeting kids where they are, Lisa will provide insight into helping students manage digital footprints and the essentials of teaching participation in social media.
I think its essential for schools to not only show kids how to safely consume internet content and social media, but show them that the web is a place for them to contribute quality content for both praise and feedback.
Last week, my principal and I presented a master class about using technology to promote the good work of students and teachers at the Expeditionary Learning National Conference. If you haven't heard of Expeditionary Learning, I'll echo a comment made during a keynote at the conference -- "Expeditionary Learning is one of the best things happening in education that you haven't heard of...yet"
Our class focused on helping schools more quickly and easily get student and teacher work available to the public by using a couple of easy, some free (twitter, vimeo, blogs) and some not so free tools. Sharing the good stuff of your schools has to be easy.
Our premise is, that if its hard, and if it takes a lot of time, you won't get it out there. Teachers are busy, and rarely have hours to spend editing video just to get a quick snapshot of something that happened in a classroom. Its taken a few years, but we've designed a school website that combines static elements (location and our mission statement, for example) with dynamic elements (RSS feeds from the Principal's Twitter account, school Vimeo channel, etc.) This allows us to infuse our school website with changing content that doesn't take a lot of time to update.
Below you'll find the Prezi we used to support facilitation of the class.
Next step will be to build a cohort of embedded student reports -- Students who can Tweet, quickly edit video, and share the good stuff that's happening in school.
It is essential that students see positive, constructive examples of their work, both in classrooms and on the web.
I believe that it is a great idea to do what you are doing because it will provide better communication skills between the students and teachers and it will also provide a better education. I also think that it will encourages students and teachers to keep at it instead of being lazy and giving up.
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