Social networking

Since there is no discussion this week, so I don't forget I am going to post my discussion here so I have a place to refer to.  In my experience with students these are the social skills and competencies I have seen.  First looking back at another part of the article strikes a chord with me.  Families who have access to books, attend concerts, have discussions at dinner, and go to museums develop skills that help kids with school.  Computer use in the one also increase the skills students will have.  Ethics are not inherent the need to be taught be a mentor and via media instruction.  Play, I keep thinking back to Oregon Trail,(previous post) and how we could solve problems while traveling the trail, if we didn't die before the game ended.  Today some of our students play Sumdog which allows them to use math at their level to compete against other students and gain things for their avatars.  Some classes have done the stock market game to understand economics.  I like that the addressed the difference between off task and multitask. Our school is beginning to use google communities to share knowledge.  Students will be using schoology for their communications.  I give the students lessons each year on selecting good sources for research. Our fourth graders use ven diagrams to compare different versions of fairy tales including video versions.  Last year our sixth graders made their own versions of give a mouse a cookie on educreations.  Our fifth graders are giving news reports using a green screen. Rather than creating links on my web page I just maintain bookmarks on a delicious page for students to access.  Reading about the social networking makes me reiterate my wish for facebook and my space.  Since kids are creating profiles anyway and lying about their age to do so I with they would just allow kids to be honest about their age but automatically enable safety measures when someone under a certain age creates a profile.  Our school has a Facebook page for the community to check into.  Media literacy needs to be worked on more in our school, where do we find the time for everything.

       Second questions we had student save their items to a server with a teacher facilitating sharing until we started with google docs a couple of years ago, however due to inappropriate use of email by students teachers still need to facilitate the sharing.  Fourth grade also uses kid blog which also requires teachers to preview comments before posting.

   Third question I would probably use google since that is what many schools are moving to due to cost reasons.