Internit use Policies for teachers

A teacher in my building was sent home for 3 days last week with out pay for being accused of something that did not happen. So this is what happened during his prep hour he was listening to a sports pod cast of a radio show out of Chicago. He had to go make some copies and talk to another teacher about something. By the time he got back to his classroom his prep hour was done, well we all no what happens to are computer screens when we leave them for a period of time. He went to take attendance thinking that he had minimized the pod cast before he had left his room and his projector was turned on also. Well when he hit his mouse the pod cast screen came up and a student see what she thought was porn when it was just an advertisement with a lady in a bathing suit. This particular student gets on her Facebook during school hours and writes that this teacher was on a porn site when he really was not, you all know what happens when one student starts something like this.

We all no what happens next administration gets a hold of this and talked to the teacher about the incident. He told them what had happened and even told them the name of the web site URL, so they check his computer and find nothing they even check his school issued laptop and find nothing. Every thing seemed fine, until a parent calls one of the local television stations about what had happened in class. The television station called the teacher to ask him about the incident. They then call the superintend asking him questions about what happened with this particular teacher.

What does administration do send the teacher home for 3 days with out pay, instead of telling what really happened and making the student apologize as for what really happened. And by the way the student only got her computer taken away for 1 week. Today we get an e-mail from are union president informing us of internet use at school. Yes we are not supposed to check personal e-mail on school time only on are duty free lunch or before and after school. My wife will send me e-mails to my school address during the day just as many of you have sent messages to other classmates about the topic we are working on and yes I do answer them one I get a free moment during my day. And how many of you have went on a radio station and played music during class. I do now that every time I show a Youtube video I always worry about what type of advertisement will show up or what type of picture will appear on the main page.

Do you think that this teacher was treated far for something that never really happened. And by the way on my way to school one day my 16 year old daughter asked if this particular teacher was getting fired for what suppose ably had happened. Hear this teacher is in the middle school and high school students were even talking about it.

Google

Google has taken some heat for the lunch of it answer to social networking with Buzz. People are saying that Buzz invades privacy. Buzz was added to Gmail last week and when Gmail users signed up for this social networking tool they found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by Google. This was based on the people each user communicated with through Gmail and chat services. A lot of critics viewed this as in invasion of privacy and they faulted Google for failing to ask permission before sharing a person's Buzz contacts with a broad audience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html

Report Cards

I feel that schools should stop sending report cards and news letters in the mail in fact maybe even the weekly news letters that my elementary age daughter gets every week. The reason for this is look at the money they could save on postage and paper, of course the post office would not like this. Then the money they save on postage and paper that sometimes never makes it out of the classroom could go to use in the classrooms on technology. So do you think that I am correct on this or not?

FREE STUFF !!!!

My principal sent this out.

Herff Jones Education Division in Chicago has a contest that they are putting on for teachers. This is a pretty cool idea for anyone wanting to win some prizes and some cool technology for the classroom. Teachers are supposed to make a video of themselves using the StrataLogia program an winners will be getting free licenses to use the program, or possibly win Smartboards. When he talked with them about it, they made it sound like there would be a lot of winners, and that Herff Jones is really eager to give these away. Here is the link to the website stating all the contest details.

http://www.stratalogicachallenge.com/video/

digital nation

Will multitasking one day last week I came across the following program on PBS. It talks about how kids today are multitasking through out the day how we are turning into a digital nations. I think you all will find it very interesting plus it will take up around 2 hours of your time to watch all of it.
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=fixed&utm_source=fixed

Moodle questions

Yes Moodle is similar to blackboard and best of all is free. As for putting the test in to it I copied and pasted my questions into it from my word documents. I have yet to learn how to import and export things into it. I will say that your students will have a hard time cheating using it for the following reasons. It shuffles all the questions around for every student taking it and not only does it do this it also mixes the answers up for each question. I still have a long way to go using it, but I guess some time in April they are going to give those of us teachers in the district using it a day of more in depth training in it.

Doom and Gloom

Some of my staff members and my self meet with the superintendent today at are once a month advisory meeting. The information that we received was not good, up to 50 teachers could receive pink slips in late March or early April. When its all said and done we could be loosing 10 to 15 teachers next school year. This means that I more than likely will receive one of these pink slips and the worst of the new was they are considering cutting some of the specials in the middle school. The cutting of the specials is not because of the budget but because of the graduation requirements. With this years 6Th graders needing to have two years of foreign language to graduate and with the math requirements. They are thinking about having students do some of these in the middle school.

As for the budget we have a 20% fund balance witch is the second heights in Ottawa county. And yes next year school district could be taking up to a 400 dollar per pupil cut, the superintendent did say that if we took a wage and step freeze next year we could eliminate a lot of the layoffs. This is were I am getting very frustrated with my union. They seem to think that we do not need to take a wage freeze nor a step freeze for next year because of are found balance. The way I see it is all the people on the executive board will be retiring with in the next 5 years. So the only thing they are looking at to me is their retirement and not the majority of the teaching staff which has 15 to 25 years to work yet.

Schools To Watch

Well Monday was the day that Schools To Watch were at my school for a site visit and everything went well. We had 10 members from STW in are building all day, they talked with all staff during class time and on are prep time plus they came into are rooms during class time. They also talked with students, administrators, school board members, and parents during the visit. I personally only had one person come into my room during class time. And I do have to brag a little about my self. One of the STW people came to tell me that all the students that he talked to said that my class was the best. They only picked 3 schools in the state this year to observe and we should now by the end of the month if we are a School To Watch.

Going Green

No this does not mean that I am becoming a MSU fan. But what it does mean I saved a bunch of trees and saved the school money and my self hours of grading papers this weekend and next week. Every marking period I get new students and that means correction any where form 100 to 150 safety test for each machine we cover in class. Those starting this marking period I had my students take their first test using their laptops by putting the test on Moodle. I have an hour or more putting each of my test into Moodle, but in the long run it will save me countless hours of grading and students like the fact that they get their grade right away. I am already coming up with other assignments that students can do using this tool to just eliminate the use of paper in my classroom. I have also noticed that it has a wiki feature that I might even try using.

New Wiki

I think I figured out what the problem was with my wiki. When I sent the request to join the class wiki I never received a response in my Gmail. So today well my students were working on safety worksheets I deleted my wiki and then made a new one and this time I used my yahoo account instead when I asked to join the class wiki. I now I shouldn't of been doing this during the school day but I had to do something. My new wiki URL is http://twork563.wikispaces.com/ and yes I got the class numbers in the wrong place I am just going to blame it on two things. 1. I was working on it during the school day. 2. My dyslexia kicked in at that time.

Usernames and Passwords

I do now that its getting very confusing with all the user names and passwords that we need to now to even get going every day. I think back ten years ago and I did not even need any of these then I started in the teaching profession. Know days I need then to log in to my computers, voice mails, e-mail's, wiki's, blog's and so on. When will it ever stop I personally think it going to get worse. The tech director at school sent the following link of an article about hackers. Because every year we need to change are passwords and people are always asking why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21password.html?em

One of the thing that I have been doing is using the same user name and password for all of my e-mails, wiki's and blog's. I know that this is probably wrong but it sure helps remembering everything.

Wiki

When I go to my wiki page I have the edit button, but when I go to the class wiki and then my group wiki I do not have the edit button at either place. Plus my name does not even show up on the members list but it tells me that I have joined this wiki. I totally do not under stand what is going on Help! Help! Help!

Frustration (wiki)

Well I am getting very frustrated with the class wiki, when I go to our class wiki I am unable to edit all I can do is read it. I do remember joining the wiki, just not sure what is going on?

Well it looks like a very busy next couple of weeks. To start with are marking period ends this week and all grades are due by Friday afternoon students are still trying to finish up some of their projects do to the fact we had 4 snow days back in early December. Then on Monday I start with all new students in my classes and that means lots of safety test to correct plus. I think this semester I am going to use the smart board and are clickers for all test this way they will be graded instantly instead of spending countless hours correcting them.

My middle school has be selected for a site visit by the Michigan Schools to Watch Program (STW). A group from the STW will be visiting are school on February 1 and I have to put things about my program together for this visit. So it looks like I will have many late nights over the next couple of weeks but I am up for the challenge.

Laptop

Over the break from are ars last class I got a new laptop that's running Windows 7 can you say learning curve from using XP for the last 9 years. And yes you Apple users out their I did look at them but the price I could not justify and plus I was not sure if the CAD programs I want to run would be supported. Coming to find out that some of the programs we need for this class will not run on this machine because of windows 7 like Photo story and not quite sure about Audacity I got it to download but that's as far as I can get. So if all else fails I will have to put them on my desktop and I do have these programs on my school issued mini.

Well I finished reading the book last night. I will say that now I have a better understanding of what every thing is now and how it works. It seemed to take me a little long to read than I wanted to, because I have an 8 year old who is addicted to Super Mario Bros. well maybe both of us are I should say and by the way I am at world 8 with a little help from Luigi. find it amazing that a video game can take over every spare minute that you have in a day and should I say even the times when you should be doing other things. I still have yet to get the RSS feeds set up for every bodies blog as of last week Thursday.

Welcome back every body and I hope you all had a great Christmas and Happy New Year.