In my home city, many schools have blogs and use it to show the projects they have done to parents, other schools and students.
It is also used to provide assignments to students though as I said before we are using Edmodo now as it is safer and we can provide rubrics to our students.
Some teachers provide pages or activities on the blogs for the students to do at home or else in class
Others give links mainly to the British Council so that students can play and learn at the same time.
During many years I used Groups from Yahoo but now I have changed to Edmodo because it is safer for students and for me.
Elena
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ReplyDeleteSure Elena, British Council websites are very useful to for those who learn English or teach English. I really like the way the schools in your city are using blogs.
ReplyDeleteIn my country, in Uzbekistan we usually use our national web blogs.
Well we are no genious and as I said I am in charge of 200 teachers and this means that not everybody does the same thing. Some use blogs, others use Edmodo, others like storytelling, traditional teaching using the communicative approach and still some others use the interactive whiteboard.
ReplyDeleteAs I said computers are a tool to teaching. Teachers are still the main thing Elena
Hi Elena: Student safety and privacy is an important issue, especially when working with children. I am glad you have experiences and have been thinking about it and can share them with the group.
ReplyDeleteYour blog looks great!
Robert
Well yes I think it is extremely important because the student's photos can be used for commercial purposes, or used for something which may not be legally.
DeleteBefore recess we had a discussion with the other supervisors about this and we decided to talk with INTEC ( the part of the government that is in charge of all technology)
We had organized an online session where each school had to share a project that they consider important. When everything had been loaded and seen, that is to say some days after the event, we realize that because they were very heavy they had been loaded on You Tube.
You may feel this is silly but the students faces could be seen on the screen and in some other cases their names. So if you google on your child's name from Google you can see his work.
Let me tell you that when we photograph a child or we use his image on the net parents have to sign an authority. If they dont sign it, children could not be photograph. This may sound silly but some parents are in jail and dont want their children´s faces to be seen or they are famous and dont want their faces to be seen like in the celebrity cases because of kidnapping, etc.
So what we generally do is to photograph with or without authority from the back. In case we cannot we photograph the group.
In the case I mention of the teacher's exchange session some students could be seen clearly and although the heads had the permission from their parents, when we saw that it was loaded in You Tube we thought that ok parents have given permission but do they know the scope of that permission? If I were a father of one of those children how would I feel?
We are going to work on that this year when classes begin in March. Find a site like Edmodo or else get something different that technitians can suggest.
As I belong to the government, you know that there may be claims to get money out of it or else we can produce an illegal action when showing faces, that is why we are worried,
Another thing is the system we use. We use Intranet, the technitians told us that this has filters something that wi fi doesnt have. Nevertheless we have record that some students have gone over to places they shouldnt have entered-
As you see there are many things to learn and things are always changing. IT is like going after something you would never reach ( forgot the proverb).
You ask me for a quote and now I remember a popular saying at the teacher's trainning "He (student) learned in spite of the teacher" So I will say that for learning English as a second language, our students can learn English without a computer or a book but it would be harder to do so. So I prefer to run the risks and get the best for our students.
Elena
Dear Elena, thanks for advice,I put right the default language in my blog!
DeleteI'm glad to have friends as you!
Hugs,
Peri