Archives for Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings

Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning: Google Calendar

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 8th 2012     

Once again, we had a great discussion at our recent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning! Our focus this month was on the use of Google Calendar to keep up with assignments and projects, particularly in Middle School.

For an overview of Google Calendar (and especially the recent update with the “new look”), watch this short video:

This session was about a new process we just started in grades 6, 7, and 8, which we think will help students, teachers and parents kept track of the ongoing projects and assignments that students are working on. Basically, we have created a shared calendar for each tutor group, where teachers will record all major assignments on the due date. This means all assignments for each tutor group are recorded in one calendar! Each of these calendars are also embedded on the teachers’ blogs. Here’s an example from Ms. Cofino.

Not only is it great to be able to visit your child’s tutors’ blog to see the upcoming assignments, but you can do so much more!

Students and parents can:

  • subscribe to this calendar, and have it display on their own Google Calendar, laptop or phone, and
  • set up reminders by e-mail, pop-up message, or phone alarm for each individual assignment!

Last month we got started by creating a Google Account (to subscribe to teacher and student blogs through Google Reader), and we can now use this same account to subscribe to the new assignment calendars in middle school.

To subscribe to selected calendars:

  1. Go to the your child’s tutor’s blog on The Learning Hub
  2. Click on the Calendar tab along the top
  3. Click on the +Google Calendar button at the bottom of the embedded calendar
  4. Follow the steps from Google here

We are just in the initial stages of this process, and will be introducing these calendars to students in the near future. Please ask them about their assignment calendar in a few weeks and have them help you subscribe too!

In addition to our discussion about Google Calendar, we also discussed how the Connected Learning Community is going for our middle school students. A few of the key points that came up were:

  • Students are learning how to collaborate effectively on their computer, often this is a support to their homework, through chatting. Although this may initially seem like casual conversation, students are regularly talking about their work, sharing tips and understandings, and helping each other stay organized.
  • In the first few months of the program, students had an increased amount of homework that needed to be completed on the computer, which may have been surprising, especially to grade 6 parents. Although they are using their computer more for homework, this does not mean they are using the computer all day in school too. We use the laptops when they are needed, just like we would use a pencil and paper.
  • Students are being supported in learning how to balance both on-screen and off-screen time. Students are not allowed to use their laptops at break, and may only use them at lunch in the (supervised) CLC Workroom. Our goals are to ensure that students have enough time to interact socially with their peers, and that they start developing healthy habits.
  • Often when students are “playing” on the computer, it seems like they are “wasting time”, but actually, research has shown how much students are learning when they are perceived to be playing. This recent study conducted by Mimi Ito through the MITPress highlights the different types of playing, and how students are learning: Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out.

We really enjoy all of these opportunities for informal conversation with parents. Looking forward to seeing you again in March!

Our next Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning will be: Wednesday, March 7th in the Loft. We will be talking about one of our most frequently used tools here at YIS: Google Docs. Teachers and students are regularly collaborating on documents, sharing their work via collections, and publishing finished pieces on their blog. Come to this session to learn how Google Docs work, how we use them here at school and why we find them so valuable! Bring your laptop for a hands-on experience.

category: Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings

Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning: RSS

Posted by  on Friday, November 4th 2011     

This month’s Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning was fantastic!

We offered a hands-on session for parents to bring their own laptops and get set up with a new tool: RSS. We love these hands-on sessions because parents are able to walk away from the session having accomplished something which will help them stay informed about their child’s learning. We focused on RSS this month because it’s a great way to keep up with all of the news shared on teacher and classrooms blogs housed on The Learning Hub.

Another great Parent Tech Coffee Morning at #YIS

We are very proud that all of our YIS teachers now have a blog on The Learning Hub where they share updates from their classes, homework and assignments, and new ideas and resources for students to engage with. Because each teacher has their own blog, this means that parents (and students) need to keep up with a variety of different blogs. That’s where RSS comes in!

Before RSS, you would have to go to each and every blog every day to see if something new has been posted. Instead, you can use an RSS Reader (we recommend Google Reader, because that’s what our students use), to receive all of the new updates in one place – kind of like e-mail for blogs and websites. Here’s another great Common Craft video to explain RSS:

So, once you’re ready to set up your own reader account, here are the steps:

  1. Go to Google Reader
  2. If you already have a Gmail account, sign in. If you don’t, you can create a Google account here (you can use any e-mail with this account).
  3. Once you’re logged in to Google Reader, you need to find the blogs you want to subscribe to, go to The Learning Hub
  4. Choose the division of YIS your child is in (ES, MS, HS)
  5. Browse the list of teachers on the right and select one of your child’s teachers, click on their name
  6. At the very top of the teachers’ blog is the URL (web address), copy it
  7. Go back to Google Reader
  8. Click on the subscribe button in the upper left
  9. Paste the teacher’s blog URL
  10. Done! You are now subscribed to that teacher’s blog
  11. Repeat steps 5 – 9 for all of your child’s teachers

Now you have all of your child’s teachers’ blogs in your Google Reader and you can easily check them all in one place.

If you have more than one child, you might want to create folders in your Google Reader account for each child. To do this:

  1. Go to Google Reader
  2. Click on any of the subscriptions on the left
  3. At the top of the screen choose the “Feed Settings” dropdown menu and select “New Folder”
  4. Give the folder a name (the name of your child is probably easiest)
  5. Done! You have now created a folder for one of your childrens’ teachers’ blogs
  6. You can easily add more blogs into that fold by clicking on each subscription at the left (one at a time) and selecting your new folder from the “Feed Settings” dropdown menu
  7. Repeat steps 2 – 4 for each of your children to create the folder, then repeat step 6 to add the right subscriptions to the right folder
  8. You can always take a subscription out of a folder by unchecking it in the “Feed Settings” menu

All of the parents who attended the session were able to complete this set-up. In the future, we’re going to add some advanced features, like subscribing only to posts about a certain class on a teacher’s blog!

Please join us next time for another hands-on Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning! Our next meeting will be Wednesday, February 1 2012 in the Cafeteria. We will focus on using Google Calendars to keep track of homework and assignments. This is another great new feature of our Learning Hub blogs! Many teachers are posting assignments and deadlines using Google Calendar, which you (and your children) can subscribe to. Now you can have all of your calendars in one place, and you can keep up with the assignments and deadlines for each class your child is taking!
 

category: Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings
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Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning: Twitter

Posted by  on Thursday, October 6th 2011     

Thank you to all of the parents who came out to YIS on such a gloomy day yesterday to learn about Twitter! We had a great discussion, and hopefully helped clarify what Twitter is, why it’s so powerful, and how we are using it here at YIS.

As usual, we started with a video, Common Craft’s Twitter in Plain English:

This short video prompted a great discussion centered around the following ideas:

Networks and Connectedness: For many users, the most powerful thing about Twitter is the people and organizations you can connect with on a personal level, and how those connections help you build a network of people that are interested in the same kinds of things you are, and can support you (as you support them) in your learning goals. We talked about the way that Brian uses Twitter to connect with other Librarians in international schools to find great visiting authors, and how he can actually connect with those authors in person if they’re also on Twitter (which many children’s book authors are, because it’s a great way to build an audience).

Trivial Content: The great thing about Twitter is that it appears, at first glance, to be all about trivial content – like “I just ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” kind of updates, but it’s not. The power of Twitter is the links that are shared. You can’t fit much into 140 characters, but you can fit a brief descriptive statement and a link to a blog post, website or article. Once you have built a network of like-minded people on Twitter, most of their tweets will share great resources and links that are relevant for you. We talked about Kim’s recent experience with a research article that wasn’t downloading properly from the organization’s website, and after one quick tweet, only a few minutes later, someone else had the link to the same article from another location. This kind of thing happens all the time on Twitter.

Balance: When first learning about Twitter, it seems like you would always have to be following everything that happens, and constantly be on your computer or phone to track when people update. Thankfully, this is not the case. Although at first it seems daunting to have so much information coming to you, over time you learn that you don’t need to constantly check your Twitter feed. You start to think of Twitter as a river that you can stick your toe into whenever you’re interested in learning something new. As long as you have built a good network of people to follow, the interesting and relevant things that you miss when you’re not online always come back around again.

Search & Location: One of the great questions that came up was if you can search Twitter (you can), and if you can filter your search by location (you can). So, if you’re looking for great hiking spots around Yokohama, you can actually search for hiking and filter the results to only include tweets from within Yokohama! Of course, this can be a bit of a challenge if you don’t speak Japanese, because lots of local tweets will (of course) be in Japanese. There are tons of people in Japan that tweet in English, though, so don’t give up just yet! Here’s another Common Craft video that explains how Twitter search works:

Finding Your Tweeple: It’s a bit daunting to find people you want to follow on Twitter when you first start. One great way to get going is to find someone you know and respect (could be a friend, an author, a celebrity, an athlete, whoever) and then take a look at who they’re following. Usually the people you want to follow also follow people you’ll be interested in. People can also create “lists” on Twitter of individuals they want to follow as a group. Looking through other Twitter lists of people you respect can also help you find great people. Last year we talked about using Kim’s Japan Twitter list to keep informed after the 3/11 earthquake. For those of you interested in education, here’s a blog post for the YIS teaching staff to find great people to follow on Twitter.

Twitter and YIS: We have a number of teachers and classrooms at YIS sharing on Twitter! You can keep up with them using this list, which also includes announcements from the YIS website and  the Middle and High School Daily Bulletin. Our students and teachers are connecting with other students and teachers around the world to share, collaborate and learn with others.

Next Meeting

Our next Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning will be on Wednesday, November 2nd at 9:15 am in the Cafeteria. We’ll focus on using RSS to keep up with your child’s learning at school. RSS is a really simple way to get all of the updates from a website or blog to come to you – kind of like e-mail for websites. Now that all YIS teachers have a classroom blog, this is a great way to stay informed about what’s happening at school. Please note: This will be a hands-on session, so please bring your laptop with you and we’ll help you set up your very own RSS reader!

Image Credits

category: Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings
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Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning: Summer Technology Fun

Posted by  on Wednesday, May 4th 2011     

Today was our final Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning of this school year so we focused on ways that families can use technology tools to share their summer holiday experiences. There are lots of opportunities for families to spend time together, creating and sharing media to show other family members about their travels in Japan and around Asia. One of our favorite tools is VoiceThread.

VoiceThread is wonderful because:

  • it’s amazingly easy to use.
  • it’s web-based, so anyone can create and view a VoiceThread.
  • it’s collaborative, so more than one person can edit and comment on a VoiceThread.
  • it’s easy to share with friends, family and anyone else via the Internet.
  • it combines visual media with audio – creating simple and effective multimedia projects.
  • it allows the creator to upload almost any kind of file (including images, movies, presentations, documents and .pdfs).
  • we have a special Education account with VoiceThread so every child at YIS (who has used VT for class) has a premier account which allows unlimited uploads.
  • it’s free!

Here is a sample VoiceThread created by students in Ms. Bloom’s grade 5 class earlier this year:

It’s easy to see how powerful it is to have images and voice combined into one simple presentation. You can even draw on the images as you record to highlight certain parts. Recently VoiceThread improved their services to make finished VoiceThreads look even more seamless, take a look here.

Students at YIS have used VoiceThread for a number of projects, for example:

  • each grade 5 student created a VoiceThread as a reflection tool for their PYP Exhibition (see them here: 5B, 5G, 5L).
  • grade 12 used VoiceThread as a presentation tool to collaborate on a research and presentation project about the effects of industry on the environment.
  • grade 6 students collaborated on VoiceThread presentations when they were researching different cultures in Humanities.

In fact, VoiceThread is so easy to use that once Kindergarten students have been shown how the commenting process works one time, they can do it on their own!

If you’re interested in using VoiceThread to share some of your summer holiday experiences with friends and family around the world, you can easily create a free account on the VoiceThread website and/or ask your child if they already have an account.

We discussed ways that we can use VoiceThread, here are a few ideas that were shared:

  • Create a VoiceThread about summer travels and share via Facebook or on a family blog.
  • Using VoiceThread as a presentation tool for student-produced projects at school.
  • Bringing VoiceThread into the professional realm to use it for presentations that need to be viewed multiple times or in multiple locations.

If you’re interested in using VoiceThread with your children and weren’t able to attend the session, there are tons of great tutorials available on the VoiceThread website. Here’s one that covers the basics:

Try it out and let us know how it goes!

Very briefly we also talked about Twitter as a communication tool and reviewed some of the highlights from last month’s session. One of the highlights was the power of Twitter as a collaboration and connection tool, exemplified by the story of a project we’re working on here at YIS and in other Tokyo schools called Quakestories. Please take a look at the website and share with your children – they may be interested in participating too!

Our Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Mornings will return next school year, starting in September, and meet regularly on the first Wednesday of the month at 9:15. Hopefully we’ll be in the same location for every session next year.

A huge thank you to our dedicated group of parents that attends almost every session! Looking forward to seeing you all again next year!

category: Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings

Parent Tech & Literacy Coffee Morning: Staying Connected in Times of Crisis

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 6th 2011     

This morning we had a small group of dedicated and enthusiastic parents with us for our monthly Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning. Thank you for joining us!

Adam, Elif, Brian and I had originally planned to focus this session on VoiceThread (another fantastic tool we use here at YIS), but given the recent situation here in Japan we decided to talk about the ways that we use social media (specifically Twitter, Facebook, and Diigo) to stay connected during times of crisis. We hope it was relevant, and that this wrap-up will be useful for parents that were not able to attend today.

We started by introducing Twitter, using the Common Craft video, Twitter in Plain English:

Our discussion about Twitter focused on both the concern that people don’t want to be bombarded with trivial information (from friends or otherwise) all day, as well as finding the time to manage the steady stream of information. Although, at first glance, it seems like Twitter can be both trivial and a waste of time, we have discovered that it is an amazing source of information especially for professional growth, as well as during a disaster or crisis.

The most important step in developing a meaningful Twitter account is in the connection you make. Building a network of contacts that you can trust helps make Twitter extremely useful. For example, over the last year (since I learned we were moving to Japan), I have developed a Twitter list (or group) of people who tweet mostly in English and live here in Japan. This list has been a huge help throughout the past few weeks. Many individuals on my list are reporters or work in the media field and have been translating Japanese press conferences into English in real-time. There are also a number of amazingly helpful individuals that are regularly sharing balanced and informative articles and websites with highly relevant information. In fact, my Twitter list is so useful and effective that I haven’t really watched any TV news regarding Japan since March 11th.

It is important to remember that it does take time to build your own Twitter network. Don’t be afraid to follow someone and then decide to unfollow them later. It’s all part of the process. You may want to start with my Japan Twitter list to find people in this area and then select specific people to follow from that. Often you will see people you follow reply to someone else on Twitter using the @ symbol followed by their username (ex: @mscofino). If the conversation looks interesting, you might want to click on that username and follow them too!

In addition to Twitter, we have all been using Facebook to keep up with the news – it’s not just for friends anymore! Many corporations, news agencies, and governments now have Facebook pages that you can “like” so that their updates appear in your news feed. Here are a few that we have found especially helpful:

Finally, here at YIS, we are using Diigo (a social bookmarking tool) to collate useful links related to the current situation. We created a group specifically for our YIS community. This is a great tool for us because anyone who is a member of the group can add links and anyone can view them. You can search through the list of links using the tags in the lower right. This way, we can ensure that all relevant links for our community are listed in one central place – instead of relying on e-mails back and forth.

We hope today’s session was helpful! Please feel free to share other ideas for using social media to stay connected here in the comments!

Next Meeting: Our next meeting will be Wednesday, May 4, 9:15 – 10:15 in the Cafeteria. We will focus our session on an exciting tool that many of our students and teachers are using regularly, VoiceThread. VT is a very simple to use, web-based, tool that allows students to upload images or videos and then record their voice. What’s so special about VT is that completed Threads can be published online, allowing other students, teachers and parents to watch and listen and leave their own comment! We’ll share some ways that VT is being used here at YIS and help you create your own account so that you can leave comments too!

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Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning Recap: RSS

Posted by  on Wednesday, March 2nd 2011     

We had another successful Parent Coffee Morning today! With about 30 parents, we had slightly smaller turnout than our average for these practical monthly sessions. But don’t worry, we’re already planning a hands-on session to help parents set up their own RSS reader sometime in April, so if you missed this morning, you can catch a more in-depth session soon.

We started our discussion with a quick introduction to RSS, Common Craft style (as usual):

Then, our discussion focused on how parents here at YIS can make use of this exciting technology to keep track of what their children are learning and the most recent news from our teachers. Basically, as parents, you can:

  1. Create your own RSS reader (we recommend Google Reader because that’s what the students will be using)
  2. Visit the YIS Learning Hub, and select your child’s school division (Elementary, Middle or High)
  3. Copy the URL (website address) of the divisional blog you want to follow
  4. Paste that same URL into the “Add Subscription” button on Google Reader

Repeat steps 1 – 4 for each Teacher Blog you want to follow (also found on the divisional blogs), as well as your child’s own blog.

Now all the news from school will be delivered right to you!

This is a great way to keep in touch with what your child is learning, as well as helping them keep track of homework assignments and projects. Of course, you can also take advantage of all of these blogs by leaving comments for students and teachers – this can help us keep the lines of communication between school and home open around the clock (but please don’t expect responses 24 hours a day).

Parents loved this because:

  • Now they can see every time their child writes a new blog post (no nagging needed).
  • They can keep a close eye on what their child is learning and reflecting on – these student blogs will eventually become electronic portfolios of your child’s learning.
  • They can keep up with what assignments and projects are assigned and upcoming – by the start of next year, all YIS teachers will have a blog.
  • The Middle and High School Daily Bulletin can be read using an RSS reader – so all the announcements come to you.
  • Our very own Technology and Literacy Coffee Mornings re-caps are posted on a blog – now if you miss a session, you can catch up in minutes!

This combination of blogs and RSS is incredibly powerful. We will be teaching all secondary students how to manage their own Google Reader account next year when we begin the Connected Learning Community.

As always, thank you so much for attending and participating this morning! It’s our pleasure to continue to share new ideas and uses of technology tools with you!

Next Meeting: Our next meeting will be Wednesday, April 6, 9:15 – 10:15 in the Cafeteria. We will focus our session on an exciting tool that many of our students and teachers are using regularly, VoiceThread. VT is a very simple to use, web-based, tool that allows students to upload images or videos and then record their voice. What’s so special about VT is that completed Threads can be published online, allowing other students, teachers and parents to watch and listen and leave their own comment! We’ll share some ways that VT is being used here at YIS and help you create your own account so that you can leave comments too!

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Hands-on Facebook session for parents

Posted by  on Monday, February 28th 2011     

On Friday February 25, we had our first hands-on session for parents, where we went through some of the issues and concerns surrounding Facebook, and learned how to use it effectively. We had parents at all levels, from those who had never used Facebook before, to those who wanted to adjust settings and better understand how they can control their online information. While we certainly weren’t able to cover everything in just an hour, we hope that the parents who were able to attend left feeling more comfortable and in control of their online profiles.

Adam Clark (our MS/HS counselor) lead us through an introduction to Facebook, and offered an overview of its incredible scope and reach. You can download the entire Facebook Parent Presentation here. We then moved to working hands-on setting up accounts and adjusting settings.

There were a few key ideas raised that we hope you’ll keep in mind when using Facebook in the future:

  • Privacy and other account settings change regularly, so you have to actively monitor these
  • The default account settings are fairly open, so you need to manually adjust them to a level that you are comfortable with
  • Your children may have not changed their default privacy settings, and so you should consider talking to them about how aware they are of what their Facebook profile looks like to people they don’t know –  this is a great opportunity for discussion

We hope that you found this first practical session useful, and we will look forward to providing more opportunities to work hands-on with technology in the future. Our next regular technology & literacy coffee morning will be this Wednesday, March 2, 9:15-10:15 in the loft, where we will discuss RSS. We hope you can join us again!

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Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning: Blogs

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 2nd 2011     

We had another fantastic turnout this morning at our session about blogs! At least 40 parents attended, thank you so much to all of you who could make it! We also were fortunate to be joined by our fantastic school counsellor, Adam Clark. Adam will be with us whenever his class schedule permits. This morning we discussed blogs: what they are, why they are powerful, and how we are using them here at YIS.

We started off with a short video from one of my favorite companies, Common Craft (if you haven’t heard of them, check them out – their story is amazing and their videos are fantastic).

A great discussion followed, and here are some of the highlights:

Parents wanted to know the difference between a blog and Twitter or Facebook. Brian explained it really well: a blog is like a conversation you would have in a coffee shop, in depth and thoughtful; Twitter or Facebook is like a quick comment in the hallway. Usually posts on Facebook or Twitter might direct you to a longer conversation on a blog post. This is one of the exciting things about the way these tools are shaping the way we communicate.

Along those lines, we talked about how quickly students jump to share things online. One of the most important skills we’re working on with your children, is learning how important it is to stop and think before you post – whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or a blog or an e-mail. Sharing in an online format should only be things you want anyone in the world to be able to see (even if you intend it to be private), digital content is easy to copy, forward, or re-post.

We introduced our blogging portal, the Learning Hub, and took parents on a tour of the site. It’s easy to get to your child’s teachers blog by clicking on the appropriate division (top toolbar, black), then looking down the right sidebar for your child’s grade level and then class or teacher name. On each individual teacher blog you will find information about current projects and often the learning that’s happening in class.

A concern was raised that some teachers may be more tech-savvy than others and therefore some blogs may be more detailed than others. At this time, it’s important to note that this is a new initiative, and teachers are starting their class blogs as they find a need. Over the next few months we will discuss this further and eventually reach a shared understanding/expectation for the amount of information available on the class blogs. You’ll be hearing more about this in the future. For now, please be patient as we develop our plans.

Along those lines, we are also in the process of developing our teacher, student and administrator standards for technology. These documents help teachers and parents understand which technology skills are age-appropriate, so that we can successfully embed them into current classroom practice. This is part of our Connected Learning Community and will be implemented next school year.

Again, thank you so much for joining us this morning! We are so happy to have so many parents spend their time with us! Please feel free to leave comments, questions, ideas or suggestions in the comments below.

Our Next Session: RSS: Wednesday, March 2nd from 9:15 – 10:15 in the Cafeteria

One of the most powerful uses of blogging is the ability to get new updates sent directly to you, using a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). We will focus our next session on understanding RSS so that you can make the most of all of the great resources available here on the YIS Learning Hub (and beyond). As Adam promised today, this session (and the following hands-on session about RSS) will probably be the most useful ones you attend all year!

Hands-on Tech Training: Facebook: Friday, February 25th from 2pm – 3pm in the Loft

We also announced our upcoming hands-on tech training with Facebook (requested by parents). We’ll walk you through all of the details of setting up a Facebook account, filtering your news feed, creating groups, privacy settings, and generally how to manage your account. To make the most out of the session, please bring your laptop with you. All parents are welcome to attend, no RSVP needed.

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Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning: Internet Safety

Posted by  on Wednesday, January 12th 2011     

Again we had a fantastic turnout for our Parent Technology & Literacy Coffee Morning, thank you! Our topic for the day was Internet Safety and Online Responsibility, so we showed two public service announcements (PSA) from the US:

Both videos prompted some great discussion, here are a few highlights:

Parents would like some suggestions about how to start a conversation about these issues with their children at home. Brian had a great suggestion of starting with some simple stories like how Stephen Lehmann (our new IT director) was Googled before being hired here, or sharing articles from the newspaper about people who are impacted by their lack of understanding about privacy settings (like this one, this one, or this one). Whatever approach that fits with your parenting style works!

We discussed the value of being friends with your child on Facebook. On the one hand, some parents felt it was important to respect their childrens’ privacy, on the other hand other parents felt it was a great back-up or early warning detection to be friends (Bob shared his strategy of being friends, but with a no-commenting rule).

In regards to Facebook privacy, we talked about the evolution of the privacy settings and how they can change at random and with little to no announcements or warning.

In talking to your children about Facebook, it’s important to discuss not only their privacy settings, but the settings of their friends. If they have friends who have their information public, it’s possible that information your child thinks is private is not.

Regarding the first video, we talked about the nature of digital artifacts. Even if you remove a photo (or text or video) that you posted, it’s possible that (because it’s digital) someone else could have made a copy during the time it was published, and now they can post it wherever they want. Digital artifacts are almost impossible to delete in this way. We didn’t discuss this during the session, but the Way Back Machine is an initiative to archive all websites from 1996 to present. Even websites that have long-since been deleted (or changed drastically) can still be found here.

Another issue that come up was the technology needed to filter or limit what your children can see on the Internet. For the most part, although it’s possible to set initial filters, there are always ways around them (Google it or check the tutorials on YouTube to get an idea of how easy it is to find out), or the possibility of your child simply using another person’s computer, iPhone, iPad, XBox, etc either at school, on the train, or at their house. We advocate open and honest conversations with your children, setting limits and boundaries together, and developing an understanding of what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate that is comfortable with your ethics and values as a family.

One very simple strategy to help limit the number of explicit sites that could potentially come up in a Google Search is to use Google Safe Search. Here’s a video that explains how to do it:

A question came up about whether we should post any pictures online at all. We would advocate building a positive online presence by posting pictures (text, video or audio) that you are proud of, that your parents or teachers or employers would be proud of. It’s very important to be in control of your own online presence and to create something positive that both universities or employers will use to evaluate your personality and professionalism. If you are not in control, then anyone else could be.

Both parents and teachers can have conversations with children about understanding digital citizenship – those conversations may be slightly different, but it is important that we are promoting the same message: responsibility and safety.

We also promised to share a few resources for you about digital citizenship:

And a few resources that Shelly shared with us:

Thank you again for coming! We so appreciate you spending your time with us!

Our next session will be Wednesday, Feb 2, 2011 from 9:15 – 10:15 in the Loft. The topic will be an introduction to blogging and RSS – what is it? How does it work? How can it help me keep up with my child’s learning? We’ll also share examples of student learning here at YIS using the Learning Hub blogging portal.

category: Parent News, Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings

Next Parent Technology Literacy Coffee Morning: 12 Jan 2011

Posted by  on Wednesday, December 15th 2010     

We’re already excited for our next Parent Technology Literacy Coffee Morning on January 12 2011. This time around we have a larger space, so please join us in the cafeteria. Of course, there will be tasty treats provided by Stu along with a discussion about tips and tricks for helping your children stay safe online. We’ll focus the session on digital citizenship and online responsibility, as well as brainstorm strategies for managing computers and the internet at home. See you then!

category: Technology & Literacy Coffee Mornings
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