The Value of Using Cell Phones to Enhance Education and Some Concrete Ways to Do So

I am offering a class through the Office of Instructional Technology this Friday that among other things shows educators how to use Google SMS to enhance teaching and learning. When participants ask questions and colleagues (in this case the class facilitators) send emails like this one or this one that inquire why I offer a class informing educators how to use sms texting as an educational tool even though cell phones are banned in NYC schools, my answer is easy. I am fortunate to work in an office that believes in being leaders rather than followers in providing innovative support to educators. With technology changing at lightening speed, many of our educators don't yet know what it is they need to know in this vast and ever-changing 21st Century landscape and it is the responsibility of our office to help inform the educational community.

So, even though cell phones are banned (and I don't endorse not following a mandate), I promote teaching how technology tools can be used to enhance teaching and learning because we must prepare our students and teachers for the world of today, not the classrooms of yesterday. Even if our teaching is guided by certain mandates that cause the world inside school walls to be very different from the world students encounter after dismissal, part of our job as educators is to help prepare students to succeed outside the classroom. 

Reasons to Promote Engaging Technologies Even Though Schools Filter Them

Below are two comments from The Innovative Educator network’s newest member that eloquently demonstrates the importance of Social Networking for Educators and other tools such as these.

Comment left on My Page
Maria said…
Thank you, Lisa, very much for creating this site. It is so needed. We, teachers, don't always have a chance to exchange ideas with each other. I have to also add that the quality of your work is very high. Thanks again :)

From the Science Forum Discussion Board
Reply by Maria
Thank you :) this is the best question an elementary science teacher could ask. I am bursting with answers and shaking. I hope I will be finally heard. Thank you.

These comments literally gave me goose bumps!!! How amazing is it that there is now a forum that caused an educator to be bursting with answers and shake with excitement that she will *finally* be heard??? This is why I promote the idea of teaching educators to use social networks and other 21st Century tools.

After I first wrote about Social Networking for Innovative Educators many of my colleagues like the one in this email asked why I advocated using technologies that are filtered in most schools and can be used inappropriately by students. It's comments like Maria's or the one a principal recently shared with me that make it clear. As this principal shared, “We wouldn’t remove stairs from a building just because students can fall down them. We teach them to walk, not run. Use the handrail and have signs for an up staircase and down.”

Teaching educators how to use technologies like Social Networking is important for many reasons including the fact that we must prepare our students and teachers not only for life within schools walls, but also for life outside the school walls. Additionally to be cybersafety-minded educators, it is important to be comfortable operating in environments in which our digital natives students are fluent. It is also important that we model safe, acceptable, appropriate, and professional use. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity to inform teachers about the little known fact that most districts have a block or unblock a website form and I share the NYC DOE link on how to do this with them.

Giving educators an ability to use technologies that enable them to connect with others with whom they can begin building personal learning networks, is powerful. Perhaps even more important is that technologies like blogs and social networks provide educators with a much-needed, but often missing voice, that is kept that way in school districts like mine that have mandates in place to ensure this. But now Maria is bursting with answers and shaking with excitement that she will *finally* be heard. Doesn't that say it all???

The Creative Workaround and A Googley Idea for Professional Email Signatures

At a recent staff meeting my Director asked if staff members felt their creativity was being stifled? About half the hands in the room went up. I was torn in my answer because I couldn’t recall much of anything being stifled in my current position other than being asked to remove my blog url from my NYC DOE email signature. Aside from that I’ve been fortunate to delve into extremely exciting waters creating and delivering innovative classes to educators throughout the city. Those who I’ve touched have experienced my passion and excitement for this work and one of the things I love is how our classes enable participants to get in touch with their creativity and discover new ways to engage students. So…I haltingly put my hand up…half way. Then quickly back down. I mean the reality is, I’ve been asked to take down my blog url. Yes this is something I disagree with, but heck, over the years I’ve overcome bigger obstacles to get around bureaucracy to do the right thing. So, Mr. Fischer, I’d like to retract my answer. I’m an innovative educator in the Office of Instructional Technology and you’ve taught me that we are the leaders in pushing thinking. We are known for coming up with great work arounds on the fly. These are some of the things in which my Director, and many educational technologists, take pride.

My hand is back down. My creativity has not been halted. I’ve thought about this and I think that not only have I come up with a creative workaround, but perhaps even a new trend in professional email signatures. As one of my favorite mentors Alan November (Will Richardson, Marco Torres, Lucy Calkins, Penelope Trunk, and my Director are others) so eloquently taught during my first encounter with him a few years back…there are ways to get to the top of the results’ list in Google for free. (See question 13.)

If you’ve been following my posts here and my Tweets at InnovativeEdu you may know that as a new entrant to the edublogosphere I’ve been fascinated with a couple things as of late.1 - Egosurfing in the name of my blog (just how do people Google it???) 2 - Sharing Ideas for Making a Purposeful and Professional Digital Footprint.

You also may have noticed I’m a Google Certified Educator where among other things I learned the importance of being Googley. This got me thinking…if I couldn’t model best practices by sharing my blog url in my professional email signature, I could do so by including my Googlability. In fact maybe this is something all educators can start doing. Google me at…which in true innovatively educating and leading style starts the conversation that The Innovative Parent explains is about having an active digital footprint (side note: she started the wikipedia entry on this!).

Edubloggers and Google Certified Teachers, this is my call out to you. What is your digital footprint? Who have you told Google that you are? Include it in your signature along with your blog url (if your employer will let you) and take a moment to add it to your blog listing at SupportBlogging.com.
Innovative Educators why not start teaching a Google Me at... class where students learn the intricacies to create an active digital footprint and learn how to get to the top of the results list in Google. I've set up a wikispace for those interested in collaborating on the Google Me at... class.

Follow the Classroom 2.0 conversation on this topic here.

Attention is influence and the importance of educators having a voice

I’ve learned so much from my personal learning network and in particular my colleague The Techomnivore who was recently asked to contribute to Technology and Learning’s DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS blog where he writes about using gaming to enhance teaching and learning. He is a terrific writer with a lot to share and very smart guy who I continually learn from in person and from subscribing to his blog Tales of a Techomnivore. When he got this gig, I just had to ask, “So, do you get paid for your weekly blog column in Technology and Learning?” He said he did not. So I pried further and said, “What is your motivation to do it then?” He said he was recently somewhere and heard someone say, “attention is influence. “ This is important to him because he has a passion for discovering ways technology can enrich our lives and an even higher goal of giving every child the opportunity to succeed. He shares these ideas around the world through his work, at his DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS blog, his Tales of a Techomnivore blog, and through speaking at conferences. As a result there are educators, students, and parents benefiting from his fantastic ideas to establish an engaging and relevant curriculum.

I’m driven by many of the same desires. I believe it is crucially important that our digital immigrant educators begin teaching in meaningful and engaging ways that our digital native students will pay attention too. Part of bridging the gap between the natives and the immigrants occurs when the immigrants are communicating with the natives in the 21st Century platforms to which they connect and are familiar. My blog, wiki, and social network have been an extension to my work by providing me with vehicles that enable me to share ideas with other educators that propagate this. Now that I have finally started a blog, I have spent the past month working hard to establish a purposeful and respectable digital footprint that I have shared with other educators through word of mouth and through including my blog in my email signature. Unfortunately, I was informed I could no longer include my blog url in my email signature, but ironically, and thankfully, I have a blog and social network as a platform to bring attention to a decision that I found morally and ethically unsound. Because of this I was able to connect to others who agree. Since I posted my blog entry about a day ago others have shared their online reactions as follows:

Scholastic Administrator

Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education NYC Schools Ban Work-Related Blog Address

May 8, 2008 Posted At: 09:30 AM

Weblogg-ed: Learning with The Read/Write Web And No Blog Tattoos Either
Posted by Will Richardson on 08 May 2008 02:36 am

The Gothamist
Department of Education Restricts Staffers From Publicizing Blogs in Official Email
By Jen Chung on May 9, 2008

NYC Convergence – Media and Technology in the Tri-State Region
Education Dept. Policy Restricts Employees' Blog Use May 09, 2008

Educational Insanity Blogging and Free Speech Rights of Public Employees
Posted by Jon Becker on May 8, 2008

The Ed Jurist
Academic Freedom, Garcetti & Blogging
Posted by Justin Bathon at 5/9/2008 1:02 AM

The WebFooted Booklady
Spring Diversions
Posted by Lesley Edwards on Thursday, May 8, 2008

I was also interviewed by Elizabeth Green at The New York Sun who wrote Education Dept. Restrictions On Blogs Rile a Staff Blogger on May 9, 2008.

My hope is that my blog will help provide a voice that will inform and reverse decisions such as this. I welcome others to have their voice heard by commenting to this post to share thoughts. I invite readers to follow the developments here at The Innovative Educator blog.

Follow the Classroom 2.0 conversation on this topic here.

Ideas for Making a Purposeful and Professional Digital Footprint

The Innovative Parent explains there are two different types of digital footprints: Active and Passive. Passive footprints are not created deliberately by the user such as information uploaded to the internet by way of companies providing public information. An active digital footprint is very different. It is the deliberate creation of this footprint. Facebook and MySpace are perfect examples of this. Bloggers also have active digital footprints as they write to share thoughts, ideas, photos, videos and more to carve out their prints.

In a recent post innovative educator Will Richardson shared a story about a teacher with a provocative active digital footprint. He quoted this from a Washington Post article on teachers with Facebook/MySpace sites:

Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

This begs the question, how can innovative educators begin preparing students, parents, and colleagues to create a positive, appropriate, and respectable digital footprint if they themselves are unaware their digital footprint will be viewed by unintended audiences, and are unaware of, and not purposeful about, their own digital footprint? I have five ideas to enable innovative educators to begin developing and modeling the establishment of a responsible, respectable, and professional digital footprint.

Five ideas to enable educators to develop and model a purposeful and professional digital footprint.

1-Model responsible footprinting with your own practices in blogging, commenting, social networking, and picture posting.
2-If you have established a professional blog, share it widely and proudly such as placing it in your email signature (if your employer will let you) and as Jeff Utecht suggests include your blog url when you comment on others blogs and in other forums. This enables others to see best practices and is a great way to get the conversation started.
3-Google yourself (aka ego surfing). If you have something posted online that you'd be uncomfortable having a current or future student, parent, colleague, or employer find, delete it (if you can) or request that it be deleted. There are ways an aggressive internet detective can still find this information, but most won't go through the trouble and the mere fact that you deleted it shows some level of responsibility.
4-If you do have online personal information and/or interests you wouldn't want discovered, use an unidentifiable screen name/avatar. This means you may need to update your screen name/avatar in your existing online presence.
5-Engage in the conversation and professionally comment, reply, and present online, onsite, and at conferences.

Hopefully these ideas are helpful for some readers and I’d love to know others experiences with negative or positive repercussions from digital footprints. If this topic is of interest click the following links from a 20-something career expert who shares another perspective on why the lines between personal and professional lives should be blurred and why the whole idea of our lives being available for public display is actually pretty cool.

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Who's Writing about this entry?

Greg's Weblog

My journey in the world of ICT's in Learning and Teaching...

Responsible digital footprints

Posted by Greg Carroll on May 9, 2008 7:21 PM | Permalink

Mandate Against Professional Blog URLs in NYC DOE Signature

Apparently I prompted a mandate by the NYC DOE that no employee can have their blog url in their email signature. I find this particularly upsetting because as the PD manager for the Office of Instructional Technology for the NYC DOE I think having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures. Heck, I think it would be great if educators were just consumers in the blogosphere and if we held them accountable to standing behind a blog url in their signature…that would be a fantastic professional learning vehicle for them and modeling tool for their students and/or staff.

But alas, as of today I received a call informing me that as a follow up to the standardization email I received last month, legal has advised that if you work at the NYC DOE your blog url must be removed from your signature. Additionally, I will have to add a disclaimer to all posts and comments (that I will receive soon from legal) that goes something like...the views expressed here are my own and do not represent that of the DOE. What happened to the idea of celebrating the successes among us and promoting the idea of authentic publishing and sharing and collaboration of ideas? I'm okay with a disclaimer on my blog (although I think a disclaimer on comments is extreme), but not so happy on the mandate to squelch the sharing of the existence of my blog ideas by eliminating the url from email signatures.

I'm well aware of other ways to share my blog url, but putting it along with my contact information helps identify me with more than just and email and phone. It enables me to connect my name to my ideas in a signature which enables my network to learn and grow as well. Yes they are my ideas, but so are all my emails. If people want to brand themselves (with a professional blog or an ethical quote for that matter) and share and establish their safe, appropriate, and acceptable professional digital footprint...shouldn't they be able?

Thoughts? Opinions?

Follow the Classroom 2.0 conversation on this topic here.

Further Reading from Joyce Valenza.

What Not to Blog Part 1

What Not to Blog Part 2