Edina Digital Age Learning

Much of this session focused on policies for student blogging and people sharing their experiences. The #comments4kids Twitter hashtag and Comments4kids wiki were mentioned as great sites for publicizing student work and inviting comments from other students or educators around the world. Jeff Utecht shared these guidelines from the International School in Bangkok. Our Web 2.0 Code of Conduct (.pdf alert!) has some similar content, but perhaps too heavy handed in our wording? Note: #13 was actually added by our lawyers! One participant suggested that the forms permitting student blogging should be sent out a couple of weeks after the blogs have been set up, to be able to say, "Here's this cool thing your child did. May they have permission to continue?!" Others cautioned that it was important to get permission ahead of time, especially if the audience was public. This led Steven Anderson to wonder out loud over where permission should stop. Do we need parents to gr...

I was planning to write this post today, and then I saw a post from Scott McLeod with a chart showing student learning curiosity and engagement with content. To answer Scott's question about whether technology is to blame for this, I think the answer is NO ! The other day I saw a post on Clay Burrell's blog regarding a webcast he attended from a group called Teachers Teaching Teachers titled, "How to Make YouthTwitter Less Schooly" or something to that affect. Clay has had some interesting posts in the past about "schooliness" or "schoolishness" if you prefer as it relates to student blogging. It got me to thinking about, whether "schooliness" was a digital/technology issue, or whether it has been around regardless of technology's influence. I see my own two children's experience (admittedly a small sample) similar to McLeod's chart on learning curiosity. They are both naturally inquisitive, and excited about learning, but I ...