education & tech

We've been writing on education for more than eighteen months now and every once in a while had mentioned Stephen Downes posts. Since he has many posts and we aren't capable to read them all on a daily basis, we have to filter all that information on a weekly basis. Today, we just accomplished it that's how this post came up to be presented.

What's the Future of the Web?

Technology Review (need registration) asked technology innovators and luminaries, what the Web might be into next ten years. Thirteen visions were collected by Kristina Grifantini and they range from the pessimistic 'total end of privacy' to the optimistic 'developer empowerment'. The most common theme is the 'mobile web' and perhaps the most unlikely is 'we will all have chips in our brains', summarize Downes.

Who Are the New Philosophers of the Web 2.0.?

With so many people speaking and writing on education it's hard to follow the conversations when you have other activities more than be online checking feed subscriptions and getting the screen radiations from your computer. The Twain Blog writes on why not all teachers can catch up with all stuff the new philosophers of the Web 2.0. (Upper echelon of education technologists and bloggers ) are working on and are very much familiar.

The gap is evident and expanding, particularly between core teachers and these generation of online experts. This instructional technology educator, make a list of six wishes, in order to keep "connectivity with the teachers [he] work with."

After all, his wishes will stay on hold because, he can’t accomplish them. He has to work!

Misuse of Words in Learning

We need to simply stop defining learning as work, homework, lessons, classes, lectures and redefine these as aspirational activities; sessions, challenges, projects and clubs, writes Donald Clark. He says we have seven bad language habits we should avoid while learning(not teaching) and he suggests, in place of teaching we must promote a language of learning with words that instill positive values. These words include: trust, respect, quality, responsibility, unity, peace, thoughtfulness, happiness, patience, care, appreciation, honesty, understanding, love, friendship, humility, hope, simplicity, tolerance, courage, cooperation and freedom.

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Mike anticipated this document before I have. He not only cited to the Downes's Speech in Spain (Internet in the Classroom), but has also translated part of his speech. Job we were pending with gabinetedeinformatica.net However, to fill Fernando Santamaría's expectations, here we present our work based on Esperanza Román's blog [es], she writes:


I agree with all those who praise Downes' figure, because of his genuine and indisputable commitment to the education world (although some prefer to concentrate solely on the most folkloric of his so evocative edupunk speech, also too eduhippie atrezzo and his digital shop much edupop ). Also, like Diego [es] said, I don't think Downes simply took neither a good nor a bad impression of the audience by the questions that were done to him. Nor do I believe that Downes is aware of how strange some of his answers sounded, in interpreter's mouth (I haven't had time able to hear the original audio) or how difficult it can be for many teachers and professionals to follow his advice on how to steal time to the clock.

That is why I applaud from here that we talk and write about what it's been really thought of the affirmations, both, of Downes(certainly not to radical at this time) and any other person of the stature of this educator. As many have said, some of the ideas presented by Downes are anything but innovation (which does not mean that they are not valid). Others may be debatable and others, improved after some restatement. But the most important ideas, in my personal opinion, are:

- Think about all of them.
- Look for the applicability it has in our immediate surroundings.
- Try to answer all by ourselves, those questions that provoked certain strange in Downes, like the assuption that in the conference room where he pronounced his speech, there weren't more laptops among the audience.
- Recognize with no shame that our standard of "connectivity" is lower than the U.S. but even so, we have many ideas on how we work and collaborate in the web, even facing immense technological limitations from our countries in general and our work environments in particular.
- Follow up the conversations, so that all the voices are listened, not only those in agreement with the majority or with the state-of-the-art fashions.

These are the reasons why I've committed, voluntarily and in a altruistic way, to the Conectivistas [es] group (Connectivism). We sincerely believe that the most appropriate way of advancing knowledge in this field is collaboration and dialogue among people interested in improving education, maximize technology, analyse the influence it has on society and, commit to these benefits, so they can be enjoyed by all sectors of the population.

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It's being a way long since I wasn't able to read a post like Chris Lehmann's wrote last week. He's been reading Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody and looks at how some of those principles can be applied to facilitating change in schools; Lehmann is sure that some of the frustration about change shows up when you compare it to the blinding speed of change in so many other facets of our evolving society right now.

A continuation we reproduce a paragraph we think, calls everyone to take action, because as Lehmann says, 'hard' shouldn't be the reason we don't do it!


"We could use the tools we have to start a call for change. We could look to set up a core set of principles for school reform that harnesses the best pedagogies and the new tools. We could look to build a coalition of administrators, teachers, parents and students to take action in the upcoming campaign. What might it look like? Shirky points out that for collective action to work, the action must require enough effort on the part of those taking action that decision-makers take notice. We could all go to used bookstores and look for old, beat-up textbooks and send them to our Congressmen with a flyer saying, "Is this how students should learn in 2008?" and a list of our core principles and goals. We could coordinate it all with Web 2.0 tools. We could follow up with an online petition to the McCain and Obama campaigns asking for a presidental debate on educational issues."

That's not a secret, the rapid pace of technological innovation has affected virtually every sector of the American marketplace – except education. Today’s schools look largely the same as they did a century ago. There may be more Internet access and more computers in classrooms, but the traditional public educational model – one teacher guiding a large group of students through a lesson – has not changed, at all.

What are you waiting for?

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I am writing on this blog for more than four years and I've read many blogs, surprisingly I've never felt the necessity to write on these events that are created to support those bloggers, educators and writers, who stepped forward on determined issues, as in our case the Education.

Today, while reading on Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen, I happened to check out his links and what I've discovered was an excellent blog written by NYC Educator. After this long period, writing and reading blogs on education and technology, I thought no more blogs needed to be find. How wrong I was.

An interesting aspect of Carnivals of Education we came across, while reading NYC Educator, was the number of carnivals these blogs had patronized during month of July. All three pages we will refer to, are getting close to the two hundreds of voiced links and post on education, in a particular sequence! And I even wrote a single post on these matters. Why do you think is important to subscribe to this kind of events? Or, is it irrelevant that you might to skip it and keep moving?

Carnival of Education, July 2008

Carnival of Education, 178 Edition. Held by Educator Blog.

Carnival of Education, 179th Edition. Held by Scheiss Weekly; and,

Carnival of Education, 180th Edition. Held by Steve Spangler.


There are some precious jewels to grab among these carnivals. Surely you will benefit from at least one of them.

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All people interested in education weren't present at the NECC 2008, that's why, still after two weeks we keep reading notes and trying to pick what it's interesting for us. We will pick a post from Bud Hunt from Colorado, where he speaks about the Day of Teacher Play and we've found one of his paragraphs quite not only interesting but philosophical:

Our students need to see us struggle and reach and grow and try and explore and learn and fail and stand back up at the end and say, 'Wow. What’d I learn here?' That’s probably the best motivation for them to get their hands dirty. And we’ve never any credibility if we ask kids to do something that we won’t do.

Isn't that a jewel! How many colleagues are thinking of this. It's human nature to be scared of failing but teachers are humans and then, they are also entitled to fail. Nothing wrong with failing, teachers fail, students fail. The fact of the matter is, we wouldn't the knowledge accumulated today, if scientists were always correct.

I was trying to find a related post in Technorati about Geoff Powell session, What Effective Computer-Using Educators Know about Teaching: An International Perspective and unfortunately we couldn't find any. While focusing on increasing their technical fluency, we run the risk of assuming that all teachers understand foundational learning theory and child-centered classroom practice.

The only record I've found is the liveblogging made by Bud the Teacher. (Bud Hunt).

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The Angeles Times has a column, for those who are not familiar with it, called The Homeroom. In this section, bloggers interested in the education matters write and publish their ideas. Last week, Rebecca Trounson wrote a history from one The Homeroom bloggers, Antero García.

Antero Garcia teaches English at Manual Arts High School in South Los Angeles. Garcia has a master’s degree in education from UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences. And we think his tale is seen on more than one of the crowded schools in the States (Elizabeth Board Education handles over five thousand students only in its Secondary level!)

Its very sad what these poor colleagues go through. Teachers are dragged through hell because of No Child Left Behind and are constantly mistreated. No one wants to see that. Every minute is accounted for. Every second. They should at least have their own room. Only lip service is really paid to education.

This is what Antero wrote -related by Rebecca Trounson, "The only slight snag in the entire scenario is that there isn’t enough room for every teacher to have his or her own classroom. I’ll be one of several teachers who will be 'roving' or traveling from one classroom to another throughout the school day."

Imagine if this is happening in America, what might be exposed to, schools overseas. Garcia continues: "Although traveling from classroom to classroom isn’t necessarily the ideal teaching situation, I’ll admit that I don’t mind it that much. Sure, I don’t have my own desk, my own bookshelf, or even a lot of board or wall space for student work. However, I can often use these drawbacks as excuses to pillage and plunder the resources of my oh-too-kind hosts... I’m also privy to the innovative and exciting lessons taking place in other teachers’ classrooms. Sure, I may need to hustle a bit faster to get to my classroom on time (just like the students), but at least I can see something interesting when I get there."

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Some Not So-Good News About U.S. Education - Survey shows tendency from fair to poor

I am pretty sure this is not science and shows only an statistical inference but, obviously, something is happening,( no just now) with the U.S. Education. How come half of Americans may think, educational system is doing only a fair to poor job of preparing students for college and the workplace, even though education ranks behind only the economy and gas prices as a top issue for Americans.

The other half? They think education system is falling behind that of other countries, and six in 10 said the quality of American schools has declined in the past 20 years.

Science or Technology...?.

It seems extrange we still have to discuss these things today. At the same time, it's impossible to just skip it and just...move on.

Help David to complete his post and help educational community to clarify such a philosophical dilema: "I am not certain that Computing can ever be a science in that it does not have a body of fundamental knowledge independent of other sciences. It is a very important technology, perhaps the most important at the present time and thus deserves academic study."

I've delighted to read her letter-post and this is the very first time we quote Sheryl from 21st Century Learning, but today's post is a Open Letter and we want to share it with you, particularly some paragraphs we were really impressed about our takes on technology in the classroom:

...If you can be replaced by a computer then you probably should be! The truth is that technology will never replace teachers, however teachers who know how to use technology effectively to help their students connect and collaborate together online will replace those who do not.
[..]
Sylvia Martinez says we are trying to solve this 21st C PD issue in schools with 6% of the population (teachers) when 94% of the population (kids) are better positioned to help us learn what we need to know to be successful. Turn your classrooms into learning ecologies- learn with and from your students. Get rid of top down, expert driven instruction methods and nurture self-directed discovery- both your own and theirs. Turn your passions into classroom curriculum. Get excited and mentor your kids integrating your passions with core content and foundational knowledge. Help them develop a love and understanding for culture and our rich heritage. Advocate hard to get the metrics we are using to measure classroom effectiveness changed- for we teach what we measure. Leverage NCLB to push for personalization of curriculum in an effort to meet AYP and all the various needs of your subgroup populations.

Teachers wouldn't be replaced by computers(robots), rest assured that even when that's entirely possible, no machine can make intellectual work as teachers have to do it on a daily basis. We do agree, we teachers, have to learn a lot from students on technology knowledge and skills. The challenge is yours(ours), we can still keep peace with those eight years Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach talks about, educators can and they have to re-learn and act under a redefined concept of professional development!

I've missed her post lately for some reason but today I went to check my feed reader and what I've found is Jenny D. ( that's all I know) already made her Thesis's defense and she's being kind to share some of the pictures of this event. We've following her experiences while she wrote the thesis and want to congratulate for the hard work involved in her career as a researcher now.

It pays the effort and sharing experiences online using blogs. Congratulations again and good luck on your career. Read her latets post on Robert F. Kennedy about the hearings during 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The advent of Web 2.0 has brought hundreds of tools available. But you only need one to get started sharing resources you find on the Web. Gathering web-based resources is part of our hunting and gathering stage of development as educators.

Microblogging (wikis also, are well disseminated now) is a great way to share not only information but knowledge and in this field Plurk has came to steal light from Twitter. While many educators, technologists or both are way familiar with these tools, the great challenge is getting involved our administrators and leaders. Miguel MGuhlin, has been tough writing on this matter:

I'm tired of reading about how leaders need to be mollycoddled, babied, nursed, trained, led by the nose, inspired, etc. Aren't you? Come on! If they are really leaders why aren't they the heck out here in the edublogosphere? Why aren't they reading the latest research and embracing the latest technologies to transform teaching, learning and leadership?
[...]
If you're waiting for comments from school administrators, we may be here a while. Those leaders not only don't write blogs, they don't read them either...

Should we abide by the legal empowerment each school district to persuade or mandate our leaders and administrators to learn how to use technology? At this point, schools districts don't legally require teachers and administrators to know the proper use of technology, in order to maintain employment with the District. "The problem is that professional development isn't equated with learning...it's tied to "schoolin'" concludes again MGuhlin.

James Farmer, head of edublogs.org, is happy to announce the relaunching of his website. The following is the e-mail we received just today:

"It's been a long weekend over at the Edublogs Ranch, but a throughly satisfying one, as Edublogs is now running on the very latest and greatest version of WordPress!

We've got a customizable dashboard, brand new avatar options and a brilliant new uploader (that automatically makes perfect galleries for you!)... not to mention now over 100 themes to choose from.

You can find out a whole heap more here.

And if you've lost your password or username, it's now even easier to get a new one here. (you just need to pop in the email address you're receiving this email at)

We hope you like the new features as much as we do :)"

We've quoted more than once Stephen Downes, and today after reading over one hundred post that come from his feed, we are able to share with you the five most useful under our blog Philosophy. He's one of the most prominent bloggers among those writing on education and he deserves to be followed:

1. He wrote a post over The Teacher Appreciation Day, but he's thrown a big question.
Does Steve counts as a teacher? Michael Larsen, Mary M,and Anymouse had posted answers on this one. Our appreciation is Steve should be considered as a teacher and should say a Teacher's teacher. Reasoning my answer with the introduction I've just made on top.

2. Just yesterday my wife's daughter was being called her attention for posting some of her personal pictures on Hi5. On this post he questions what is most dangerous posting information on blogs Hi5, Facebook or whatever or send your teenage kids to work evenings and weekends at McDonalds. Predators are everywhere, caution is always advisable.

3. Quoting Judy O'Conell, he raise concerns about what it'll be the roll of Yahoo for Teachers. How this new beta (look for invitations) will solve some problems for schools, or just create new ones. Education has a lot to be with theory, so as far as I am concerned, this will be another place for this business.

4. He abides by the Scientific Method and really, really calls for an stop of 'multiple choice surveys' being called research or worst scientific! I would like (same as the Stephen's link suggests) all educators (not only researchers read, Robert Nola & Howard Sankey's book Theories of Scientific Method
for a better understanding of what we talking about.

And the last one as for today and for myself,

5. A new issue (at least for me) is brought to the bench. Steve Downes says we shouldn't be paying much attention to the 'syndication' word, but (and this is news to me, again) the difference between (open) syndication networks, and (closed) federations. No comments here, I have to read more and deeper to understand more about what Jon Udell is into. Help my teacher!

Technorati: stephen+downes, netiquette, scientific+method, federations

The picture left-side of our post belongs to Michael Casey who's member of Free Use Photos Group in Flickr and which is a creative way to share photos that can be used freely and without restrictions. Please, join in and allow scholars, education community, bloggers and share your shots!

Stephanie Hirsh & Joellen Killion wrote a post in Education Week a few days now and they wrote something that all teachers must be concerned. Certainly, for almost a decade, efforts to raise student-achievement levels have been mostly about driving standards through the schoolhouse door, they say. In other words, accountability has meant putting pressure on educators to raise performance. But ensuring that educators have the necessary skills, knowledge, and tools to help all students achieve has not been approached with the same urgency.

Teacher qualifications will work to improve the teaching force in the nation’s low-performing high schools, particularly, but at the same time it will be more challenging than closing the teacher gap at other levels of schooling, for example, in part because out-of-field teaching is more common in high schools and under this cirncumstances makes no favor to minority students.

Hirsh and Killion, continues and add, "common policy and practice focus on individual professional learning, rather than team-based and schoolwide learning; on increasing the number of staff-development days, rather than restructuring the workday; and on isolated professional-development plans, rather than those that are embedded in school and district improvement plans. This approach ensures that only some teachers and their students benefit, not all teachers and all students."

However, our fellow Kim Cofino, an international school teacher has felt and experienced that isolation and comes up with suggestions of how to help teachers become more proficient not only by instruction but experiences of what she calls the 21st. Century Educator. After putting into action her tips and tricks she declares:"I have learned more in the last year and a half than I had in the previous six and a half years combined."

The question is, how teachers can hold themselves accountable, and not only to respond to the government or the Boards of Education. Kim has created an excellent post where among other things she's doing and she's asking to do the following: join a social network, set up a RSS reader, attend conferences for free, become a Blogger and a Twitterer, develop social connection through socialnetworking and socialbookmarking.

So, unload yourself of all the pressure to get only great performances in your students and focus on your personal training, taking advantage of what now it's being labeled as Web 2.O tools.

Technorati: school, teachers, accountability, web 2.0

Tom Barret is really serious about his ideas and thoughts on using educational technology in my classroom.

Follow up the link and get knowledge of his last post on Twitter as a teaching and learning tool.

Technorati: twitter, ICT, tom+barret

Downes begins the thread quoting and getting his opinion on a post written by Joanne Jacobs and it has to be with a legal issue aroused in California, whether it is or enough to have a kid homeschooled. Downes has said it all depends on the parents' credentials to 'train' these kids in David Friedman's understanding but 'indoctrination' in the Jacobs conception. Many of his readers had get him in hot waters because it seems they misinterpret what he had said in this post and which is answered in the video we add at the bottom.

The problem is the conception we are having for education, instruction and maybe training. Are our kids getting trained or instructed, not matter what the law says. it all depends what we as educators understand as our main goal when we have kids in the classroom trying to pay attention to all what we have to say or in this particular case their parents. If what we conceive is training then parents can do that job, let them to the professionals but if it's instruction, parents are qualified to do that but of course, this is where we agree with Downes position, if those same kids are going to get involved in the 'official' system, then their parents will need to be credited to do that job. Period.

Technorati: education, downes, california, homeschooling, indoctrination

After a long period of not being reading important info and motivated by 7 Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers I've moved back to read the more than one thousand education posts I have to read in Education from our subscriptions. One of those highly qualified educators is George Siemens, who just had to give a speech at the iTForum and he even let his pdf document used for such presentation, free for us to read it online.

This paper explores the shifting role of educators in networked learning environments, with particular emphasis on "curatorial, atelier, concierge, and networked roles" of educators, to offer learners in forming wide personal learning networks for complete understanding of these fields.

In his document called, Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers he explains what are those challenges educators confront today:

Social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, Skype, Ning) provide opportunities for learners to create, dialogue about, and disseminate information. But what becomes of the teacher? How do the practices of the educator change in networked environments, where information is readily accessible? How do we design learning when learners may adopt multiple paths and approaches to content and curriculum? How can we achieve centralized learning aims in decentralized environments?

In other of his posts George Siemens concede the advantages of work in an Open Source environment and congratulates his page it's been translated into another languages such as the Chinese. How great is it to present your work under Creative Commons that under different circumstances will be a copycat. Edu2do.com is the portal translating the contents of Elearnspace and other well recognized advocators of a change in Education. They are, OLDaily, Infinite Thinking Machine and Weblogg-ed, of course.

Technorati: george+siemens, education, itforum, chinese, creative+commons, social+networks

Edublogs.org was launched and as any start up the beginning was kind of slow, but as for right now is one of the best places to open a blog (free hosted). This is a niche dedicated for educators and all related matters; however there are not restrictions as for who can open a free blog. We’ve already made a reservation that can be seen in here but being this an educational blog we would like to recommend all teachers to open their blogs just here at Edublogers.org. What are the advantages? They just launched the Forums Feature which is generating a lot of buzz because this will change the approach many teachers were having while hosting their blogs in edublogs.org; now they are going to be able to attract student and not only make them open an account but get them to participate in any issue that will be showed in a particular forum. Isn’t that great, when we all know students enjoy spending time online?

These are some reasons why you should open an account in this Wordpress platform service:

1. Experiment with contemporary, customizable themes.
2. Simply embed videos, podcasts, images and a whole lot more.
3. Import from other blogging sites – or export back to them.
4. Great support and community.
5. These are not just blogs you know… it's a Wordpress technology.
6. It’s not (just) the technology, it’s the pedagogy too.

While you click away, please, feel free to drop any comments whether you know a better place to host free blogs in an educational commitment. Enjoy!

Technorati: edublogs.org, edublogs, schools, education, classroom, edtech

The importance of blogosphere is it's changing and mutating every second. Many starts-up had flourished and some others had perished but bloggers still alive and now they have a powerful influence in traditional media. A survey conducted by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group, had concluded that "blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting." That's what hispanictips.com has reported.

As part of what our intentions are during this year, we've planned to work harder making this blog more reachable and has to be with putting yourself at risk. How is it going to happen? Whoever who has read the 16 most effective strategies to expand your blog reach in the 2008, must be aware that it takes not only writing to pursue this endeavor.

We already are bloggers and even when we have to change gears, still we all have a niche or 'market target' to publish and sell our content, no wonder some are pushing hard to sell feeds in exchange for one dollar! Yes, we are mature people but the central thing comes right now. What about the new society we are growing, those kids or teens are living the tech era and they learn and behave differently that we used to do. Are we going to keep teaching our homescholers that advocate open source software is a new good behaviour. That social networking is a way of life, the only thing you should be aware of is safety.

Miguel Guhlin, makes a very ed-resistance round up where he presents the pro and cons of advocating copyrights, civil disobedience and Paulo Freire's thoughts. Do we want critical thinking students or do we want a new society who obeys his boss, don't ask questions and ever denied something others ask to be done.

As educators new and experienced all know the learning and teaching it's not a free ideological field. Our kids are taught social studies by teachers who are either Republicans or Democrats in the best cases, because other group will hate politics as many in the society still do. Guhlin, ends his post with a very strong question: "Are you about freedom, helping children deal critically and creatively with reality to transform their world, or are you about reality bytes?"

Society and education really matters!

Global Voices Online holds in the media by itself and it doesn't need any support because its own team, the editors, bloggers and translators worldwide are doing it. GVO aim to get information spread where normally the heavy media doesn't have access or doesn't want to get to it. Today, we were reading a post from Scobleizer where he respectfully says that Global Voices Online "is the right blog to keep up with human rights blogging from around the world". We want to say, being part of the authors of Global Voices that citizenjournalism goes beyond Human Rights. Yes, we do concern about what's going on with poor and speechless people but GVO certainly explain plain clearly what are their goals. Why you don't spent a few minutes and please read the About Page of the website.

So, why some bloggers don't have a say about Kenya incidents? Is it only the Tech blogs that are being quiet?

In the education arena, David Warlick remind us of The 2008 Education Blogosphere Survey. This is the second annual survey Scott McLeod has designed and it's online and for all those educators linked to educational matters, please head up and spent some worthy time completing such a valuable bank of information.

Hurry up! The deadline for this years participation is January 26, 11:00pm, (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) See last year results here.

This is an issue all teachers and administrative have to deal with these days. By one side is the students that argue they really need to be in touch with the outside world while they're in class and by the other, the teachers that think they are being violated in their privacy. Nobody is unaware of the bullying among students and of course the mocked teachers what what we have here is a new generation of grow ups and teen who had been born in techie environment. Most of schools are banning the use of cell phone while in its grounds, some other have strict rules for such devices.

The problem is some of our students are tapping teachers activities for very short period of time which creates a (distortioned) image of the classroom teacher. Let's look at the experiment conducted by Kevin Metcalf who happens to be teaching at North Rockland High School in Thiells, N.Y. He tries an experiment with his students. He asks them to whip out their cellphones —whose use is otherwise forbidden in the classroom under school rules— while he puts his head down on his desk for a second and acts as though he’s doing nothing. He then asks them that if they were to take a picture and put it on YouTube, what would people think of his teaching?

He'd got answers like ‘lazy,’ and ‘doesn’t care.’ He tries to explain his students he would be judged by their peers on one second of a 45-minute class. The experiment, he says, brings home to the students how such an action could misrepresent the truth and have serious consequences for someone. And this is not a threatening situation. Imagine how distorted might become an issue inside the classroom if an student just tapes seconds of a disruptive class?

Now, I am not against use of technology because we already are way ahead of the counterculture of the 6O's where the youngsters were thinking the computers were about to replace men. I am part and I am living the cyberculture generation (G-gen) and of course we have to learn and teach how to use technology in classrooms, we've moved beyond projectors and VHS. Now we have very small and reliable devices to register any kind of information. We do have to allow our kids to use their cell phones but we have to teach them no how to operate them because they might the teachers in that particular situation but, show them the consequences of not using it properly. How their very own safety is involved, their families, their loved ones and even their friends.

Once they learn the consequences it will be up to them. We all know (they too) the consequences of violating safety regulation, the secrecy of our personal acts and the power involved in having a device emitting short waves to highest frequencies. Unfortunately, according to Vaishali Honawar and his post Cellphones in Classrooms Land Teachers on Online Video Sites points to two cases in Court: Evens v. L.A. Unified School District; and, Roberts v. Houston Independent School District.

From those two cases we can conclude that only whether students refer to threatening comments, a Judge will pay attention to a teacher's complain. Legislation vary according to each state but the variety of issues with cellphones in schools, the United States, legal experts say, school districts tend to ignore videos that are simply embarrassing to a teacher, but do act when they find that the taping is a threat to the school or teacher or is disruptive to learning. The court holds that a teacher must always expect public dissemination of his or her classroom
communications and activities.

A have a kid in 5th grade and he's not using a cellphone yet but I am about to give him one for Christmas and he knows how to use the lap top and links perfectly with YouTube. My question is: Will a fellow teacher feel ashamed if my kid shoots a photo and posts it on YouTube, modified or unmodified? It will be hard for the school to show disruption just because of it. We are talking about First Amendment speech here.

For more contributions read: [http://education.ning.com] or [http://dww.ed.gov]