How to Start an Uproar - 9 week course

Here are a few questions I would ask middle school students at the start of their course in Computer Education:

1. How can I find what I need on the Internet, and sift it out of the millions of websites that I find?
2. How can I judge how valuable information is?
3. How can I judge if it is true or not?
4. Is it OK to take someone's picture without permission?
5. Is it OK to take a teacher's picture without their permission and change it with a graphics program, and post it on the Internet?
6. Can we say anything we want about someone?
7. Can we write anything we want about a person / people on the Internet?
8. How can I tell what is true and what is not on tv/in the newspaper / on the Internet?
9. What should I do when I find that something on the internet is not true, but is being reported as true?
10. What should I do if someone writes something about me that is not true on their website?
11. What is the difference between a person expressing something that is an opinion that I don't like / agree with, and what is a lie?
12. What are the possible effects about writing something that is not true about someone else on the Internet?
13. Are there things that I should not openly reveal about myself on the Internet?
    
    
    We should not shy away from these things in schools. We should prepare our students for them.

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Third Party in our Schools

YouTube is here to stay. For quite some time I imagine, and I am happy about this. I think YouTube is great. I just don't want my students searching it for content at school. I definitely think that embedding videos into your school site or blog is the way to go.
Google Docs could be a great tool for organization. It allows people who don't have microsoft word, powerpoint or excel to create documents that will work or operate like the aforementioned apps. Free. And, those absent-minded professor types won't lose their work because it can't be left at home/school/work/on the bus. It is on the 'net which means it is everywhere they are.
There are tons of online applications like voicethread.com, bubbleshare, bubbl.us, and more that allow students to put work online. Often there are even more ways to protect the privacy of their work, but there is a catch. Third party services like these are out of school's control. Once you upload stuff to them, they could do things to student work such as use it for advertising purposes. And by agreeing to use their services you are already agreeing with them doing this with student work if you wish.

I say.......eh! (With a brief, somewhat apathetic shrug thrown in). The chances the FBI and Homeland Security will be interested in my grade 3's report on ants and the brazillian rainforest is pretty small. Nope, not that interesting to national security. The benefits of services like YouTube and VoiceThread far outweigh the risks. The best thing I can do is make sure parents and students are informed, but also to give my professional opinion that I think we can make good educational use of these sites, and to not worry. Just take precautions, like those I have mentioned on previous posts.





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.