Saturday, June 8, 2013

Managing it All

So as anyone who has subscribed to my blog via RSS feed may have noticed, I accidentally posted a post intended for my other blog on this blog. While there was by no means anything inappropriate about this post, a sonnet about having a bad morning has nothing to do with technology and education, but thinking about it, this does bring up a good point: how do we manage all of this content?
There are two main questions I have regarding this:
How do we make sure to keep up with all of these digital resources? and
How do we keep our personal digital persona separate from the professional?

Keeping Up

We have learned about so many great resources in this course such as VoicethreadningGlogster, and many others. All of these resources have unique potential, and all have the potential to be used together for effective instruction, so how do we keep up with it all?
One solution to this web2.0 overload would be to limit the sites that students are asked to use for assignments. The teacher could set the medium for each project. The students could still get a chance to use wide variety of tools, but would not have the freedom to select a web2.0 tool that he or she felt appropriate for the project at hand.
A great solution for teachers who want their students to be able to choose the tools they use would be Edmodo. With an Edmodo group for the class, students could post links to their web2.0 creations so that they would all be in one place. This way the teacher and other students wouldn't have to worry about emailing links to each other or visiting different blogs, and every student could use the tool that he or she thought best for the task at hand.
These are certainly not the only options, but are two very different ways in which teachers can try to manage the massive amount of information and tools they may use.

Keeping Out

Today social media is almost a requirement of social interaction. Whether Facebook, Instagram, or a personal blog, I'm fairly certain everyone reading this has at least one form of social presence on the internet. Even if we do not post anything on these sites that would be inappropriate, these profiles can be personal, and it's not unreasonable not to want students to know every aspect of your life. While teachers are not allowed to add students on social networks such as Facebook in many school districts, students may still be able to see some parts of your profile. So how do we keep this separate from the web tools we use in school?
One important thing is to always check your privacy settings. Log out of the account in question and see what you can still see. Anyone on the internet can see this, so make sure any personal information is hidden. Another important tip is to use a different email address than those students use to contact you. This way students will not accidentally encounter personal posts or information when searching for things related to school.
The alternative is to be open and share this information with students. Sharing a personal blog could create an atmosphere of openness and trust in the classroom. To be fair, however, I'm not sure I would want my students knowing everything about my life outside of school. Even if it's not something that I would want to hide necessarily, I would want to maintain some degree of personal privacy.

So what do you think?
How do you keep up and keep out? How do you plan to in the future? Would you want your students reading a blog about your personal life?

2 comments:

Heidi Cleveland said...

I liked what I that poem! I was sorry that when I clicked on "preview" in my feedly, it said "page was not found."

I thought it was on topic because the power flashed at my school this week, which makes for a long morning of resetting clocks and printers forgetting the network. We rely so much on technology that a short power outage can mess up your day.

Anonymous said...

You raise some important professional & ethical issues. One of my interns last year reported a situation in which one of her teacher friends was bullied by parents on some social networking site. Turns out the parent had a bone to pick with the teacher, learned something personal the teacher had posted by friending a friend of a friend, etc. and then used it to what sounded almost like blackmail the teacher. Who would have thought this about parents? And just last night one of my neighbors told me one of his son's teachers asked him to post something good about her on her facebook page so her principal would think she was a super teacher...turns out she has had complaints from other parents. I think this kind of parent behavior existed in another form prior to social networking on the web, but was maybe just a little less visible.

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