E-learning Wishlist 3

It is interesting to go on this journey because as I learn more my wishes are either being met or I am developing new wishes. It’s a matter of letting time do the work for me because as I absorb myself in the discovery of e-learning possibilities then the information has a chance to gel and / or filter through. From wishlist one to wishlist 2 I had found answers to my wishes. My third wish list is slightly different but I take heart from the site e-learning and distance education managed by Tony Bates. As practitioners we need to be looking at the quality of e-learning delivery. So my list looks like this:

1. Bona fide, verified and child safe guaranteed online learning sites where others interact live with students. I currently have no way of guaranteeing and ensuring these sites are safe. At the very least we need to have the same checks as we have for live teachers.
2. Good real time and online technical support so I am not held up when I have invested my time in creating a technology approach and students are reliant on technology. I have worked out it is essential to always be ready with Plan B and Plan C. Whiteboard markers rule in a crisis! We need to share back up plans.
3.Good teachers need to be encouraged and supported to be good users of technology so they can can transfer their skills into good online and technology practices. No amount of technological equipment will help an incompetent teacher.
4. Feedback on what we are doing. My participation in social networks gives me a lot of feedback and encouragement. It means I have access to a constant pool of ideas and comments. It has meant I have learnt and grown without fear.
5.Reliable pool of education friendly resources and I have found a lot of those, but they need to keep coming!

Net Safety

I have already blogged about Net Safety and the help which the CommonSenseMedia site has brought to us, but , as a teacher, I am still not comfortable with just letting students go on the Net in an unsupervised or ad hoc way. It is what we do all the time at home and most students would be doing that too. I don’t know what percentage of parents actively and routinely supervise their children’s net activities. I’d like to think most. As a parent I always had our computers in the lounge room . It meant they were in open view but it also meant anyone in our lounge room was actively sharing what they were doing. It was actually good social and learning time for anyone in the lounge room, including visitors. It showed a great side of computing. Similarly with games. They were in the lounge room. As a digital immigrant I learnt a lot about how people play games and their value as educational tools both for skills and social development. I didn’t just see games as a waste of time. In a classroom, watching how students use a computer add to my own knowledge and practices, but with t he capability of getting more students independently online, then I have some concerns. As a South Australian teacher I have to be registered to teach and that means meeting some decent criteria for teaching, I have to have done a Mandatory Notification Course, I have to have a First Aid certificate and I have to have had a police check.Not just anyone can interact with our students. All that is about ensuring quality teachers who can meet their duty of care requirements and it’s about keeping students safe. No system is perfect, but we do at least have some good benchmarks. With online delivery there doesn’t appear to be any guarantee of who is delivering the courses and materials and who might be there on the other end of the connection and so it is coming down to common sense. That will not protect us though or our students and it will be difficult with so many students connected. So we need:

1. Authentication of online teachers
2. Some way of endorsing education friendly sites
3. Somewhere to report safety issues and concerns

This might seem like more bureaucracy but you and I have both read about he Facebook stalkers and tragic consequences. We have all read about how some people invade the space of vulnerable people with their trickery and treachery. Part of what we do is teach students how to manage their own safety and protection. It becomes more difficult with constant connectivity as parents have found out with mobile phones. So I see it as important we look carefully at our classroom practices and we start to develop some common best practices for engaging with social media and online sites. I see online life as a parallel to real life and the same issues occur and need to be dealt with in a practicalway.