How can students be free to work when we restrict the environment?

So one of the more interesting pieces that I read this week was about how students can't fully research things because of blocked sites at school. This is a problem in a lot of cases but substantial research can be done without getting on these restricted sites. So what do you do as an educator?
Well here are a few of the things I have done in class to avoid this problem.
1- You have to make sure that students know how to research first. Their first call can not be to Wikipedia but they can use it as long as they know to scroll to the bottom and see where the sources are. It's also important they know where to look for research articles online. These sites are largely unblocked.
2- Social media can be used and accessed in schools. Facebook is a no-go anyway because of the process of them using their real names. Other mediums like YouTube or Twitter are great as long as you walk them through how to set it up and get parents permission. I would also suggest a tool like Edmodo to let the students use.
3- Make sure all students and parents understand appropriateness on line. They need to know the policies and procedures go with them inside and outside the class.

Tell me if this helps?? Also if you have anything you want to add feel free in the comments! Have a great week guys!!

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 20, 2018 at 5:12 PM

    I was also thinking about this topic when reading the assigned articles this past week. In the one article the students complained that there are too many blocked websites at school and they can easily multi-task when completing assignments. Well, as a teacher, I would prefer they do not multi-task and that is why we block sites such as facebook (this isn't as a popular of site with this age group but its still blocked for obvious reasons). Some students have been getting around this and been using google hangouts, which isn't blocked since its URL is hangouts.google.com and the computer sees that as a google site.

    When youtube is not blocked it is important for teachers to monitor computer use through guardian software to make sure students are using this for school work and not watching cartoons. I personally have not had any instances where sites were blocked that actually held some sort of value, but if that is the case with some school they should take that up with the district or IT department.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going offline

So this week has been pretty hectic. A lot of things had to be done for my new job, this class, and things around the house. So on Tuesday I decided to take a little time off of social media and took a step back from the computer. I do this often in the summer because I need to recharge my battery so that I can get ready to deal with 120 students for 180 days. There are some great reasons to go offline and other times it can feel overwhelming. So I am going to share with you some of the pros and cons of going offline. Cons- Going offline can be hard. Most of our lives are on some sort of online platform. If you are not the social media type you still have a lot of communication through online areas. Email is one of those things that can really hurt you if you do not check it or reply quick enough. This is the hardest for me. I communicate with colleagues the most through email. I have to check it everyday or I might miss something important like a training or a meeting. Social media
Read more

Virtual History 360

So this week during the voice thread we were tasked to use some more tools that are in the Web 2.0 framework. I got really excited when I saw Instagram and Youtube. These two I probably waste more time on than any other social media platform. I am totally a lurker when it comes to these two tools. However, I want to use these tools in my profession as an educator this year. My good friend Andy Wade is a US History teacher at a Middle school in Osceola County, FL. He has been a teacher for around 10 years like myself and was a great guy to work with. He came up with a fun little way to get more students involved in learning US History. Before we go on you have to know two things. First, Andy is a huge history buff, and he loves to travel to historic Civil War Battlefields. Trust me, he has a map in the back of his class and has a pin in all of the fields he has been to. He has gone to most of them. Second, he loves phone goggles. These are the things that you can attach your phone to
Read more

What's in a hashtag?

What's in a hashtag? That which we call a hashtag by any other word would still mean the same thing. Okay, okay enough of the Bill Shakespeare. Really though why do we use hashtags? I really never considered the answer to this question. I always thought that hashtags were there just to continue a joke or find away to be clever. For instance, my favorite hashtags to use were #merica and #hashtag.  I know pretty dumb right? Well after figuring out what the actual purpose of hashtags are I have a new understanding of them.  We can use hashtags to categorize many things especially for learning. This past year I participated in learning walks. These were for a select group of teachers who volunteered to go out into different schools and figure out what are the best practices for teachers to help students. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It worked to because I saw a lot of differnt things to show how we can be better teachers. The people in my group also learned a whole lot as well
Read more