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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Using PID's in the Classroom

Over the last month or so our class has had the privilege of using PID's (personnel Internet devices) in the classroom. We are one of the first classes in the world to experience this. I think that if you were to ask any kid in the world on a scale of 1-10 how much they'd want to use PID's in the class, %90 would say 10.


People often ask what we do to ensure Internet safety. Being to a lot of leadership conferences I can tell you the same answer I tell them. The truth is that the sites we use are very secure, we do not like to use sites that are often hacked. We have a system that we use (actually we don't use it but the person we get the sites from does)it is called the three A's of Internet safety(not to be confused with the 3 A's of awesome by Neil Pasricha). The first A is for advertisement, we don't use sites that have multiple, or any ads for that matter. The next A is for authorship, if the author's name isn't shown we can't trust the information(this mostly applies to information resources). And finally aesthetics, if the site looks cheaply made and flimsy we shouldn't be trusting them with much. After the three A's it's up to the students to to decide if what they are doing is appropriate or not. You see if there is no trust between the teacher and the student then the student may not have the privilege to use PID's anymore and their limitations are broadened.


Another point often brought up is how do you manage what the kids do and if they use their time wisely. What I find is that you don't even have to address this problem but remind them that it directly effects their grade and more importantly how the teachers see you. Students can always slack off and do other things. At one point students brought cellphones in without teachers knowing, now if we let students bring them in suddenly we find no mischief. It's like when your little sister is trying to annoy you, as soon as you ignore her she stops out of boredom.when you evaluate the situation of the non-electronic equivalent, if your worried about students texting each other in class think of the alternative, passing notes?


Bullying is something that happens everywhere. If your worried about your student or child being cyber bullied, once again you must think of the alternative which would be being bullied on the playground. However, I find that the students who are most susceptible to bullying are often helped by using PID's. This happens because the kids who are shy are the ones who get bullied, but when you give them a social network suddenly they feel like their in another universe, like they can talk. Because of this they become more confident and as a result aren't bullied.


If your considering how students don't get left out, it's partially because of one of the bet things in the world; collaboration. No, students don't always have access to these devices, but there are school devices and we can always share. To get back to my first point, if you have never seen Apollo 11 I strongly suggest you do. And if you have, that one scene where they are fixing the air filtration unit, that was collaboration. Collaboration, in case you've never heard the term before is well, you know I'm just going to pull it out of the dictionary. "Collaborate-1 work together: Two authors collaborated on that book. 2 aid or co-operation traitorously: to collaborate with the enemy."


I think that the two points of how your using the technology to learn and what you are using the technology to do can have a relatively similar answer. A major way that it helps is that it gives kids the ability to productively use the Internet. We are ABLE to use technology for everything but with the whole class quite new to this concept it wouldn't be appropriate. Because of how good kids are with technology there can be a reciprocal learning environment between the teacher and students. As one of my mentors once said, "Ti's not the tool but the pedagogy behind it."


One of the number one concerns with parents and teachers is the things students become a custom to, for example, grammar. We actually got a complaint from what I assume to be a university professor saying that we had better get used to 2000 word essays handed in as comics, well look at me, I was supposed to to 1 paged and I write 3! Things like emoticons and purposely misspelled words are just a way of displaying emotion. Kids know that they are misspelling words, I mean do you actually believe that kids think hey is spelt heyy?! And it's even good at helping with homework, for example if you have a major homework problem you can just send an email to your teacher and work it out!


XD

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