Cyber Bullying In School Workshop for Pro D Day

Cyberbullying by Proxy

Direct Attacks

Types of CyberBullies and what to do with them

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Final First List

Megan Meier

Megan Meier Foundation

Will life be a drag after EDES 501?

What does this dragstrip video have in common with EDES 501? Probably more than you might think! On your mark, get set, go!

So here's the deal: I am the driver in this video -metaphorically at least, and the 46 seconds represents the nearly 4 months journey called EDES 501.
Preparation is the key...in the video you'll see the preparation as the warming up of the tires (the "burnout") and getting to the line... in the class my preparation included joining Twitter setting up this blog and following blogs and Twitter folks, and reading the two assigned books prior to the class.

The books are a great staring point for this course. I believe there is a synergism between these books as Davies and Merchant in Web 2.0 for Schools are documenting the phenomena of Web 2.0 tools and talking about them from an academic point of view while Richardson in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts ans Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms primarily explores the tools themselves and relates practical classroom applications for each tool.  A good example of this difference is Davies and Merchant (2009:89) postulates that the wiki could be the death of the author while Richardson (2009:55) praises the wiki as a great collaborative tool. Richardson also uses more screen shots of computers for examples and discusses in greater depth the use and application of the web tools as they apply to practicing teachers while Davies and Merchant pose more theoretical and ethical questions. Together these texts are great companions for one another as they broaden the scope of the conversation regarding the use of Web 2.0 tools in education. I was one of the lucky ones who had the books early as I had ordered my books from Amazon and had them to read over the Christamas break. Having a basic understanding of the Web 2.0 world from these readings I moved toward the starting line  and was ready to begin the course.

Moving down the light tree is how a drag race is started...moving through a list of set-up activities is how I started EDES 501. The start for me in EDES 501 was exactly like the start in the drag race...things seemed to be going very smoothly, for a while at least...that first week I set up my Twitter account and "followed" the people I  found on the assigned list and tried to add others (this became easier after tweeting for a while as I made connections for peole to follow through blogs and other tweets), created my blog, my aggregator (Google Reader) and Classsroom 2.0 for my Ning. I already had a Facebook account so that part was completed. Then I completed the "Getting to Know You" form for the discussion forum as our class introductions to complete my start-up procedure.

Then just like in the drag race things started to get hairy!! And just like the video of the race there were unexpected twists and turns and steep and shallow learning curves... at times I felt like that car in the video veering out of control not really knowing how to handle the power of the machine that I was operating...the number of web tools that I never used before was the main reason that I felt out of control at times...it wasn't the difficulty of each tool, but rather the short amount of time that I could allow for the exploration of them. The toughest tool for me  personally was Twitter...I really didn't get it. There was a lot of digital noise surrounding Twitter that was meaningless such as the Starbucks seat episode and "I am now at the airport in ..." tweets. Then I loaded tweetDeck and this made the journey through Twitter that much easier...Learning the language of Twitter and the use of hash tags was a big step and similar in nature to other tools we looked at. Flickr is a good example of learning enough about the tool to get by but one that I need to revisit to learn in greater depth...I have an idea about using it to collaborate on my yearbook next year...I think if I set up an account for the school name then anyone can add pictures that I could then decide whether or not to use them for the annual....such is the way with the pace of this course though...I think after this post I'll take a break from these tools let my experiences with them move around in my brain for a while and see where in my professional and personal life I will be able to apply them.

Professionally I  see that these tools have great value, as I said above I can see making the school yearbook a more collaborative work by using Flickr not only to upload pictures to but so the students themselves are creating captions and sorting the photos using tags....this is usually an immense job taken on by one teacher and a few dedicated "yearbook club" members. Using Flickr can give ownership to many more students while lessening (I hope) the workload for the people directly involved in the production of the book.

Student journals can also be completed using blogs that can be shared with a very broad audience which could include all members of the educational community or those who have a stake in education. Realistically Web 2.0 tools would completely tear down the walls of the classroom and expose our educational practises to the entire world....a really good way for true openess and accountability in education unlike the ranking of schools on one time provincially mandated skills tests that we currently have in British Columbia.

Podcasts can be posted to school websites for students who miss lessons, wikis and nings can be set up for discussion groups within classrooms or between schools in a district or beyond allowing many educators' ideas to be shared with colleagues and students. There truly is an endless list of applications from the tools that we learned in this class and through reading blogs taking part in live sessions through nings such as Classroom 2.0 I feel confident that my professional growth from this course will be one of the many legacies from my course work in the TL-DL program.

The potential of these tools of course also comes with the risks that are inherent on the internet. As Nicola Kuhn pointed out in her blog on Facebook she tries to keep separate her personal and professional identities when dealing with Web 2.0 tools. Many companies and some school districts have teachers write disclaimers that what they are presenting on the web does not necessarily represent the school or district but is the teacher's own work, opinion or view. The social nature of these tools makes the identities easily blurred and it has been pointed out in my earlier post that we must be very aware of what we are posting as it will be seen by someone somewhere. Leah Betancoourt discusses ways to protect your online "personal brand" to prevent these types of problems.


Despite any pitfalls we must move forward and use these tools to strengthen our commitment to making meaningful, educationally sound choices when inspiring our students to be life-long learners because just like the race car inthe video they will have their squirrelly moments, but we can be their crew and help them along their journey. Like my dad always used to say "If it doesn't kill ya, it makes you stronger!" Well I have survived and may I boldly suggest thrived the "Very, Very Wild Ride" that was the journey through EDES 501  and feel much stronger for what lies ahead in teaching, learning and sharing with my educational and personal networks.

An Epiphany about an Aggregator...or Blogs and RSS by the Headlines

I feel some pressure for this week's blogpost as I have been cut from the grid due to a major wind storm here on Vancouver Island... but alas this gave my brain the rest it needed to have an epiphany about Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and blogging. I went with my family to Denman Island for the Easter weekend but the vacation and the anticipated rest and relaxation were short-lived as my wife (who worked a night shift and was to accompany us to Denman after her sleep) called and said that our temporary garage had been blown over by the wind. Luckily the ferries were running, despite the wind,  and I made my way over to see quite a mess in our back yard...about three hundred square feet of tarp surrounding a mangled and tangled  tubular frame which resembled H.G. Wells'  Martian tripods after a good dose of bacteria got to them. After a quick (three hours) job of moving equipment and supplies into the emptied wood shed I made my way back to Denman where both the power and telephone lines had been brought down by trees...Yikes! No internet...how will I get my course work completed!? I simply commuted between Denman (no power or phone) to my house with power and internet connection...the epiphany happened on the morning of "Easter Monday" I was reading the newspaper and realized that because I only had a 10 minute ferry trip that I was skimming the headlines and looking for articles that I found particularly interesting or relevant to my situation...EUREKA!

This is the world of RSS! The mundane act of reding the local newspaper in the context of this short ferry trip solidified for me what I had read the night before and I finally understood why Will Richardson (2009) wrote "it's the one technology that you should start using today, right now, this minute. And tomorrow, you should teach your  students to use it."

Learning about the Tools.

Of course the use of RSS is directly related to the main topic this week which is blogging and blogs. Through RSS the updates of blogs that I have been following come to me saving me scads of time and energy. I didn't know anything about RSS until this course. Like most web users I would mismanage my time by opening the websites that I found interesting and search for new updates. Now using Google Reader the updates come to me and like the newspaper I can scan the headlines and see if anything catches my attention or is relevant to my situation. Signing up for RSS was simple as I already had a Google account. As Lee LeFever says there are just two steps...I had already signed up now I just needed to add some subscriptions. That was easy as we were given the list of blogs that we were to follow as a course requirement. We also had to add ten of our own and that waas more challenging as I didn't really follow blogs. Luckily most blogs have an icon that you can use to save the RSS feed to your aggregator. It looks like this:

Currently I could add ten blogs every day about various things that I am interested in through sites like Technorati, reading other related blogs or by word of mouth, but then that would be overload! This is a part of the growth of blogging where one blog leads to another  and soon there is a great web of blogs that I have been following both professionally and personally.

Personal Learning and Blogging

It's a big web, a huge web incredibly massive. According to Wikipedia there are over 112, 000,000 blogs being indexed by Technorati. There are an incredible number of blogs to follow and the there are many methods I have discovered for finding blogs of personal interest. Searching through technorati is one way, networking with people of similar interest, reading blogs that link to other blogs, talking face to face with people about technology and blogging, our courses...the list goes on and on... Here are a couple of recent journeys and how I found out about some blogs that I am following... My brother-in-law, Jeff, told me he is now a blogger...so I checked out his site, Double Whammy, which is beginning to chronicle his life with both Celiac Disease and Diabetes. He has a post discussing transplant which linked to Eva Markvoort's blog, 65 Red Roses which is the battle that she had with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) which, sadly, ended on March 27th of this year.  In Eva's honour I will also add the links to BC Transplant (Organ Donation) and  the Cystic Fibrosis site. Jeff also talked about his upcoming wedding and the anxiety raised by needing to have a cake that would be appropriate for the celiacs that would be in attendance including himself and his sister who happens to be my wife. This lead to a link to the Gluten Free Vancouver blog which is a great storehouse of information such as restaraunts, grocery stores and other bits of information of concern for those with Celiac Disease.  From here I discovered the Sweet Tooth cakery site. Each of these sites led me to other related sites and so it is with the social web that we can learn both personally and professionally as a community of learners that are linked to each other in ways that we have to experience to discover.


Teaching and Learning and Blogging

Much like my personal learning my  professional use of blogging seems to have no limits. Classroom teaching, professional development, communication with the educational community are areas where blogging has a place.

In the classroom students will be able to make meaningful reflections on their work on their own blogs, make comments on each other's blogs and find blogs of interest to follow. To help them I can now use my experiences in blogging and finding blogs to give them starting points and offer tips on safety, but after that the journey will be theirs and it will be unique...of course I will need to use an RSS feed (thanks google Reader) to follow their progress!

Blogging is all about creating and maintaining community. To this end Mark J. Stock makes an important point for school adminstrators- use blogging to maintain a relationship with stake holders "Blogging, he says, provides education leaders with direct, personal access to stakeholders..." He goes on to mention that this method of communication may have less turbulence than a relationship with local media.

In terms of professional development it takes the idea of a pro-d day and makes it seem like a senseless activity. By linking with other blogging educators my ability to collaborate about trends in education, ideas for curriculum and all other aspects are limited only by my imagination and time constraints. One example of a recent feed from my Google Reader is Will Richardson's Webblogg-ed site on Connected Teaching where he quotes the American government's  new National Educational Technology Plan: “…using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching.” Obviously, this implies much more than being “connected” in the we-all-have-access sense. As the plan goes on to say, it means that “teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners” and that “connection replaces isolation.” Teaching can be isolating at times as we and our students are bound by the four walls of our classroom...blogging for both myself and my students can break apart these walls as we connect with others across the planet. A great example of this comes from Buffy Hamilton's blog The Unquiet Library entitled Why Student Blogging Matters. Here student Nolan tells of a real world person who linked to his blog who happened to be an expert in the field that Nolan was studying...ceratinly a more enriching experience than he would have had locked up in a classroom with walls as boundries.


Pro-D days have a noble goal..to help develop we teachers as professionals, but often they are over and done with and we head back to isolation...this does not need to be the case with blogging and the social web  I think it was best said on the PLP website that education should be an experience not an event; a community, not a course. This integrates nicely with our view that the web and social learning need to be integrated into classrooms....by educators that are connected and understand the value of blogging...as a teacher-librarian I now feel compelled to keep blogging and to get students and teachers in my school and district to do the same...but first I need to check the headlines of my aggregator to see what else is new in the blogosphere!