so+far

Ten years have passed since we have entered into the 21st century. During this time, technology has blossomed, both in education and in the homes of the students that we teach. We have seen the desktop shrink down into a laptop size and smaller. The Internet has become faster and faster. VCRs have given way to DVD players, and now blue ray is on the horizon. No one buys records any more, few buy CDs, and the music of today is just downloaded onto mp3 players that are smaller than cigarette packs. The Internet is now both a helpful and sometimes dangerous road to be on. Both children and adults need to be aware of the risks and safety precautions that should be employed when on the Internet. Where do people learn about these safety precautions? Who should be the ones to teach this important subject? We submit that the school has a responsibility to teach its students how to be "cyber safe". Students need to be able to handle the cyber world responsibly. This task is not an easy one when suddenly "let loose" with no restrictions and no parameters. Not all parents are knowledgeable enough to monitor their student's Internet access nor are they able to teach their children cyber etiquette. Therefore these students need to fall back on prior knowledge that they were given in school. We submit that the elementary years are the appropriate time to teach the proper use of these tools. The Augusta school system doesn't currently allow blogging or email for students. These real world applications are pieces of technology that students need to learn to use responsibly and safely. In the "real world" people from around the globe are working on projects together. Technology has allowed people in the business world, from different parts of the globe, to collaborate on projects. This allows savings for the company, while allowing great minds to work together. Collaboration with others around the city, country or world is the way of the future. Unfortunately, Augusta doesn't allow students to use technology for collaborative learning. In our opinion, it seems that the Augusta school system feels the need to "shelter” its students from opportunities that would enrich their lives. Our premise is that we need access to certain tools to be able to teach our students 21st century skills. What are these 21st century skills, anyway? The Partnership for 21st Century Skills states: “To successfully face rigorous higher education coursework, career challenges and a globally competitive workforce, U.S. schools must align classroom environments with real world environments by fusing the three R’s and four C’s: The three R’s include: English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography. The four C’s include: critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration; and creativity and innovation.”

In the 21st century, there are more demands than ever placed on teachers and students. Teachers are expected to cram all aspects of study into the school day. With the incorporation of laptops into our everyday lives in the classroom, the possibilities of collaboration and communication with other classrooms around the city, state, country, or even globally open up to students. However, these ideas do not seem to be honored in the Augusta Schools because no tools like blogging, moodle, or student emails are allowed. Our hypothesis is “When school systems tightly restrict the use of online access, are staff and students being hindered in their teaching and learning? With these restrictions, are we using best practices when teaching the students how to use computer technology in a safe and ethical manner?” Along with MLTI comes the required Bess filter. Because in many schools the entire network is represented by a single IP address, a password to bypass the filter causes the entire system to be unfiltered for 15 minutes. According to Kathy Casparius, Augusta School's Technology Curriculum coordinator, using the bypass password does not bring down our filtering system down completely. This is why many school systems do not issue those passwords to teachers. In Augusta, Bess always applies above and beyond our local filter. Augusta recently changed local filters from Barracuda to Lightspeed. The change was precipitated by the issue of netbooks to all Cony High School students. The IT department felt that the existing Barracuda filter would not handle the increased traffic well. Because of this change some previously unblocked sites were blocked once again causing much frustration among the teaching staff. The Children's Internet Protection Act requires that students be protected from pornography and Bess seems to do a good job at that. Jeff Mao, Learning Technology Policy Director for the Maine Department of Education says, " Implementing a filtering system that allows teachers to override the system for just their computer requires that the filter is local (ie not implemented at the State level like BESS) in most cases. Then, its purely a matter of creating usernames and passwords as well as establishing practices around them, and policies. Ideally, teachers should, at the minimum, have override passwords because it is written into the same federal rules that demand that schools filter...it also speaks to the notion that teachers should be able to override the filters when necessary for the purposed of academic research." Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis are still fairly new and administrators are still sorting out how much to restrict. Unfortunately, since most of these decisions are made by the people who face the wrath of the public if something inappropriate slips into the schools and not by the technology integrationist and classroom teachers who can see the value of these tools in the classroom, it often requires the end users to convince the IT folks to loosen up the filters. Jeff Mao says, "In my opinion, filtering is necessary, but it controls need to be placed in the hands of the teachers. Teachers may need a little more training and a specific protocol to follow to determine if a blocked site should be white-listed, but in general, that decision should rest with the teachers. They have both time and self-interest involved. While they don't have lots of spare time, when they need a site unblocked, if they had the access rights, they would have the time right then to unblock the site as well as the self-interest to get it done. When this is left to the IT department, there is no way that they can be responsive in time frames that are relevant to the classroom. Its not their fault, but there are too many priorities on the plates of the IT department, and no self-interest involved when it comes to white-listing a web site." -+ In order to “break through” these restrictions, Andrea Criss decided to “pilot” a program in the two schools that she works in. This would be a collaborative project between 6th graders in two different schools. It is hoped that this project will open the doors to other collaborative/interactive projects in future years. The 6th grade is now piloting the use of Moodle in the hopes that we will be allowed to not only use it with the 6th grade, but with even younger students. Since we at the elementary level have not had any tools to use for student communication and collaboration, I put in a plea with the powers that be to allow me to pilot the use of Moodle at the 6th grade level. Luckily, the sixth grade is required to do a Service Learning Project this year. This is the first time that has been a requirement and the Curriculum Coordinator wanted technology to be used in the project, so I was given the go ahead. I work as a technology integrator in two elementary schools. Each of the schools has two classes of sixth grade students. One of the classes is a fifth/sixth grade combination class. I asked the four sixth grade teachers in those schools if they would be willing to try using the Moodle course management system, and they were all excited to do so. My first task was to learn how to use Moodle. I had encountered Moodle as a student at Thomas College, but I was more familiar with Blackboard. First I attended a training session on using Moodle at Thomas, but that was geared for using it as a student. Then I used the moodle.org web site to gain a basic understanding of how Moodle is set up. I learned about the roles that can be assigned to members of the moodle and what permissions go with each role. I also learned about the different features that were available in Moodle. My supervisor acted as the site administrator and set up the Moodle for me. She assigned me the role of teacher, added the list of people who were allowed to join, and gave me an enrollment key to use. I went over the list of possible features with my supervisor to see what I would be allowed to use. She and the network administrator didn’t think the kids should have the blogging feature. They tried to block it, but were not successful. The four teachers involved were added as students first and granted teacher status after learning a bit about Moodle. Eventually, I was given editing teacher status so that I could delete members as they moved away or were removed from the class. The next thing I needed to learn was what a service learning project consists of. Most of the teachers didn’t really know how to go about doing one either. The kids had become involved in the Pennies for Peace project and were collecting pennies. Students at one school had read The Breadwinner, a story about the life of a young girl growing up in Pakistan. Teachers at the other school had read to their students the young adult version of Three Cups of Tea, the story of how Greg Mortenson became involved in building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I found a curriculum for the project at the National Service-Learning Clearing House site. We were all set to go until someone said, “Isn’t this supposed to be a local community project?” Some thought it had to be local and the rest didn’t know. We decided that the kids needed to have more input into the selection of the project in any case. I don’t normally meet with the 6th grade classes, so I rearranged my classes and scheduled some time to introduce Moodle to the students and teachers. It took a week to see all four classes. The kids were extremely excited about using Moodle. I think they at first perceived it to be a social networking site like Facebook or My Space. Before we started we discussed the rules of using Moodle such as using respectful language and not overdoing the texting slang. The kids were also told not to login to Moodle without permission, and they were only going to be using it in class to begin with. After enrolling in the class using their school user names and passwords in combination with the enrollment key, we had the students set up their profiles. It was a great opportunity to discuss what was safe to post online. Students who were allowed by their parents to use social networking sites shared their rules for what information they were allowed to post. I told the kids that even though this was a closed system and the public would not have access to it, we would not be posting phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or anything other than Augusta as our home address. My supervisor was afraid that by posting pictures of themselves, it might result in bullying outside of school. We had the kids find a picture of something or someone to represent themselves and had them upload it and put it on their profiles. We practiced posting comments to a forum asking the kids about their first impressions of Moodle. It didn’t take long for one of our students in the behavioral program to post an inappropriate comment. The comment was deleted and the student was removed from the members list. It was decided by the classroom teacher and the behavioral specialist that the student wasn’t likely to be successful in controlling his behavior, and he was removed from the class. Our first real forum was an opportunity for students to post their ideas about what type of service learning project they would like to do do. Responses ranged from cleaning up the local park, to helping Haiti recover from the earthquake. Other ideas included building a warming shelter for the local homeless, helping out at the animal shelter, recycling at the schools, and planting trees. One of the teachers at Lincoln suggested helping Avian Haven, a local bird rescue center. The student were quite interested in that, so the the Lincoln students decided to take that on as a project.

At that point in the process, the teachers had just been assigned the role of teachers in the moodle. I asked them to post a forum question of their own. When I checked the Moodle, I found that two had posted their questions under an old forum. One had tried to post a question in a new forum, but she had forgotten to scroll down and click on save and display before exiting the page. Opps! I realized they needed a little more training.

To add resources for the kids to begin their study of birds downloaded a video on Birds from United Streaming. I had trouble uploading it in Moodle at first. I did learn that the size of files you can upload is limited to a maximum size of 16MB. That meant that I had to reduce the size of the movie before I could upload it. Since United Streaming divides their movies into downloadable segments I simply chose only the sections I was most interested in. I could have chosen to edit the movie using iMovie, it would have taken much more time. After successfully uploading the movie, I decided to create and post guide sheets on adding forums and resources for the teachers to use. My hope was to encourage the classroom teachers to get more involved in using the Moodle.