Tag Archives: policy

July 5, 2013 · 2:41 pm

Module 4 part 1:where I was, where I am, where I might go…

What I am looking into and thinking about at the end of this first week:

  1. BYOD, one to one, how does it work? is it a good idea? as a solution to access problems within the school. Who is doing it? who is doing is near me?
  2.  District policy: what is it? who is creating it? how is it being implemented in the district?
  3. Finding out who is doing what in my district with ICT
  4.  Finding/making connections with people who share interests and are working on the things I am working on
  5.  Learning how to organize my own digital intercations and how to help students be organized. Can I use my own personal blog (which I just started this week so that I will share my practice not merely share separately and solely for each of my individual UBC courses)
  6. Pursuing particular resources ie mindmeister, blogger, wordpress, wordle, popplet, pearltree, and so on
  7. Learning how to use this application to do what I want with my blog posts (arg photos and using the iPad are proving to be challenges so far)
  8. Creating developing and expanding my PLN, and learning how to talk to strangers, or even people I already know but do not normally engage in these ways.

I find that my mind is very overwhelmed after each of these classes and I am having trouble holding on to all of my thoughts about things so the above list is merely a fraction of the things that have occurred to me during the last 4 days.

What I have done as of 2:25 of Friday afternoon:

  1. all the blog posts and all that that we are required of course.
  2. started a new Blogger Blog for myself Adventures in Reading, Learning, and Teaching (which I chose because I have Google and I had already created a course blog for LIBE 465 using it)
  3. in order to get a grasp on my ‘Connected Self’ I have started a list on my blog of links to all of my content on the web including my Showme Account, Prezis, my other course projects blogs, wikis…that is all I can think of at the moment.
  4. I was able to capture all the blogs I had been following from my Google Reader! ( just in time too 🙁 )
  5. started a Pearltree to represent my own learning on started to collect some materials on some of the topics above
  6. started a popplet can’t get the popples to move and they are all stacked on top of one another got mad and closed the window… I’ll go back to it later
  7. I have come to sit in the Chapman Library Commons to contemplate what it is all about.
  8. decided to stop at 449

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July 4, 2013 · 6:14 pm

Module 3 part 1

I’ve decided to focus on definitions for ICT in my own school district. I am feeling in many ways like the district is producing roadblocks for learning through ICT for both teachers and students.
So how is ICT defined in our district?
On its public website the district provides a resource called digital citizenshipwhich has information intended for students staff and parents. Part of this resource is a page called “Guiding our Practice”. On this page are teacher responsibilities and resources divided into four different categories: privacy, copyright, use and access to information, and behaviour.
The resources that are given for use and access to information include
Points of Inquiry and the The BC Ministry of Education doesn’t use the term ICT instead they use ‘digital literacy’. They give the following rationale : “Many organizations use different terms such as ICT (information and communication technology), educational technology, computer literacy, and others. We view these terms as synonymous with digital literacy. In any case, what matters most is the definition, since it provides common understanding and outlines the scope.” It goes on to define digital literacy as “the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others in order to participate effectively in society”

So I assume our district accepts the BCTLA’s definition of information literacy and the Ministry’s definition digital literacy in place of what in this course we’re calling ICT.

How does this relate to librarianship and library teaching?

I find it encouraging that a lot of the work being done on Digital Literacy in our district is being done by District Librarian Heather Daly (also the BCTLA President). It’s coming from the library not the IT department. This seems to indicate that the district feels that TLs have a role to play that is very important in this conversation (I assume that somewhere someone is having a conversation about it). I think that On a practical real-world level it is necessary for the TLs to become the school experts in ICT, to support/provide professional development at their schools, to collaborate and to bring ITC in the classroom. Especially as part of the definition above is “construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others” and students are going to be expected to do that digitally.

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· 6:07 pm

Module 3 part 2: Roadblocks

What are the roadblocks?

Roadblock 1: lack of teacher training in the district in and around ICT. What I find most baffling of all is that the digital citizenship page discussed in previous posts was news to me. I had never seen it before doing the work for this course. It was never pointed out to me at a proD, nor did we receive email from the authors of the pages indicating that they had been added to the district website.

Roadblock 2: making the Internet seem scary and dangerous to parents. The parent resource page contains merely links to cyber bullying and Internet safety related sites.

Roadblock 3: concerns about privacy and cloud computing on US servers have discouraged teachers from using applications that allow students to publish in the real world instead teachers are encouraged to use the SharePoint platform which is all password protected. Makes it nearly impossible for students to “share everything” and “talk to strangers” in any real world authentic sense. (They do provide permission forms for each of the approved applications on the digital citizenship page but as mentioned above I didn’t know about those until two days ago. Not to mention that separate permission forms for every single application seems a pain in the butt.)

Roadblock 4: Access and ease-of-use are hampered by District policies such as the inability to download anything onto network computers and strict controls on District iPads which prevent the purchase of apps and the use of air printers. These policies create the need to call in an IT support staff person to do many simple things.

All that isn’t even taking into account other roadblocks like lack of funding in general and lack of access to infrastructure such as bandwidth, hardware etc. in particular.

BYOD is starting to look like a solution to many of these problems because, left to our own devices, we can work around issues and have more freedom using our own devices!

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