Just got blog-blocked...

I'm wondering how many other teachers/students out there have the problem of their district blocking web sites at the first sign of student mis-use. Last year we were able to use some YouTube videos to complement our lessons. This year they blocked it. I helped a Special Ed. teacher find a site that allowed students to "create their own superhero," which tied into a lesson she was doing in Language Arts. That site is blocked too. After attending the ICE conference in St. Charles, Illinois, in February I was introduced to Netvibes as a way of keeping track of blogs or podcasts that I might want to follow as a means of building a Personal Learning Community. This morning, I try to open my Netvibes page... I'll give you three guesses. You'll only need one.

I'm on the tech committee for our building and I'm a contributor to some of our district tech meetings, and we've even discussed the problem of blocking sites purely for the sake of keeping kids away. We came to the conclusion that instead of blocking everything, we should be educating the students on how to use the Internet appropriately. This is beginning to remind me of 2-3 weeks ago when China started blocking YouTube for the videos related to Tibet. There's great information out there, but if we just block it instead of exploring it as an educational opportunity, we're losing a great tool.

Perhaps my question should be this... are there districts that have come up with a good way of teaching their students appropriate uses of the technology? I'm finding that's not happening here, as far as I can tell from my Language Arts classroom in this little corner of the building, and instead we're opting for the quick fix.

This is a quick post, but I want to make sure to publish it before they start blocking my blog!

All ideas and no assistance...

I've had some great ideas lately for projects involving the use of technology -- most notably Web 2.0 technology -- that I think would really engage the kids with the material. Multiple problems arise when I try to plan out these projects and implement them.

Problem #1: I've never worked with some of these tools before...
The Web 2.0 tools that are available are just mind-boggling. (Or should that be mind-blogging?) Blogs, Wikis, social networks, etc... the possibilities seem endless, and I think that's where I'm running into a few problems. The possibilities do seem endless, and that's probably making it more difficult for me to narrow down my focus and intent. There are so many things the kids can do with these different tools, it's difficult to pick just one or two components and use those effectively. So many of the teachers in my building are either anti-technology or simply afraid to try using it, that there is very little building-level support for coming up with tech-related lessons and projects.

Problem #2: This takes a lot of setup and instruction before the kids even know how to use a Web 2.0 effectively...
At one of our last district meetings on implementing technology and 21st century literacies in the classroom, part of the discussion focused on teachers' fears that they couldn't use technology because the kids were already "masters" of the Internet. As "digital natives" they already knew so much more about the digital world than we (the immigrants) did. I don't think this is true at all. The kids know of the digital world, but I don't believe for a second that they are masters of it. I used that assumption that they were masters at the beginning of the year, but many of them, even at the 8th grade level, don't know how to post something on a blog unless it's MySpace. I can't even remember how many times I told them to e-mail their essay to themselves so they could work on it at home and the response back was, "How do I do that?"

It takes a lot of setup and pre-instruction to get the students ready to use Web 2.0 tools, and my problem with that is the lack of tech support at the building level here. So far, this year, we've had two different tech coordinators for our building, with long periods of no tech coordinator in-between. We currently have no tech coordinator for our building. Even the ones we do get are not necessarily teachers, so when I go to conferences and hear about the LA teacher working with their building's tech coordinator to prepare students for a Wiki project, that doesn't seem like a reality here (at least not yet.) The district-level tech facilitators have been great, but they can't come to your building every day to help out with something. It is nice to see people getting excited about some of the ideas I have for integrating Web 2.0 tools into the Language Arts curriculum. Most other teachers are so freaked out by words like "blog" or "moodle" that they don't want to have anything to do with them. That's completely understandable... when I didn't know what they were, they confused me too.

Problem #3: I'm still new and this and I'm overwhelmed...
I know this is coming off as being a long and rambling complaint with a list of excuses... a new baby at home, increased responsibilities and a leadership role at school, family health problems... I don't want to make excuses, but with all that's going on in personal-life and professional-life, I don't have time to run a one-man show with regard to coming up with lessons and projects that use 21st century tools.

If anyone has any solutions or suggestions, I am all ears (or eyes, as this is a blog and not a podcast!)