Activity 9

Scenario 3: Anonymous Blogging
Ms. Gifford learned about a new blog that does not require the arduous process of setting up individual accounts for each student. This seemed like an easy way to jump into blogging as a class. Ms. Gifford talked about acceptable use with her students but did not inform the principal or parents of her instructional goals or objectives for using a class blog. Because students did not have accounts, they were able to post comments on the blog anonymously. Although, this protected student privacy, it snowballed into a barrage of inappropriate and harassing comments. Ms. Gifford quickly shut the blog down and went back to the drawing board.

Ethical issues: Parents should be made aware of any time their child is going to be posting items onto the internet.  Perhaps this is covered in this school's technology policy. However, parents should be made aware of the their child's internet usage.

Safety/Well being: If this site is open to the public and anyone can post with an anonymous user-tag it could be dangerous.  Since there are many online predators, anyone can access this site and begin to interact with a student who may not know how to handle this situation.  Therefore, this site would need to be closely monitored by the teacher if she wishes to continue using this open site.

Recommendation: I would recommend using a closed site that students need to create a user-tag and only those who are invited can access, read and comment on the posts.  This way if there is any cyber-bullying or inappropriate actions the teacher can address this.

Real life connection: I do not have any real-life connections to this scenario.  Does anyone have any they would be willing to share?

Scenario 5: Email Complication
Mr. Lopez, a social studies teacher, has been using the same PowerPoint to introduce content on the electoral-college for many years now. He recently saw a Prezi his high school-age daughter created for a class and asked her to teach him how to create a Prezi. He was able to link images and video content instead of just text and found that his students seemed more motivated and lively in a debate about voting politics.  He decided to have his 7^th graders create Prezis in small groups outlining their main points for the election debate.  What Mr. Lopez discovered in the computer lab is that as students were creating Prezi Edu accounts and told to use their school provided email when registering, they could not activate their Prezi accounts because the school email settings only allow emails internally, and therefore cannot receive emails from outside the district. Mr. Lopez’s assignment was suddenly dead in the water.

Recommendation: I would recommend to Mr. Lopex that he have his students create an e-mail that would be internal to the district.  This way each student could create a prezi and have an active e-mail where they could communicate with their teachers.  Many 7th graders do have e-mail accounts, but many do not.  Those who have a-mail accounts would be able to create a second that would work inside the district.


Real life connection: When I was helping students use Moodle for the Biology course I co-taught many students needed to create google e-mail account and then create a moodle account.  Although this took a lot of time upfront, it was really great for students to have access to moodle.  Moodle is where lessons, assignments, study tools etc was kept for student use for preparing for tests or if they were absent or lost something.