Some great life-sized whales & dinosaurs etc.
Some creepy specimens in glass jars.
And this… the first monkey on the left:
“Act no evil”
Natural Museum in Dalian
Monthly Archives: April 2011
Happy Earth Day!
Some ‘recycled’ posters from our school:
And my favourite Earth Day video:
Happy Earth Day!
To spam or not to spam?
I comment with the intent to add value to the conversation.
When you get comments like this, do you approve them, trash them, or mark them as spam?
An open letter to the Ontario College of Teachers re: Social Media, Part 2
I’ll start by saying, ‘Shame on The Canadian Press and shame on cbc.ca’, I thought this was a news source I could rely on. Next, I’ll say, ‘Shame on me’, since I reacted publicly, based on a single secondary source for information, and I did not go to the main source. As an educator who makes great efforts to use social media in appropriate ways, I feel embarrassed that I contributed in disseminating exaggerated and miss-informed hype! I will learn from this, hopefully others will too.
Here is a link to what I said yesterday: An open letter to the Ontario College of Teachers re: Social Media Fears
But what was of greatest concern to me was the message to ‘not use’ social networks with students, and that is not the case!
The Ontario College of Teachers DID NOT say teachers should avoid connecting with their students on Facebook or Twitter.
Here is a great video they have created:
While I could nitpick and suggest some minor changes, I think that the advisory does an excellent job of saying three key things:
1. Interact with students appropriately
2. Understand privacy concerns
3. Act professionally
And, they offer sound advice that will help teachers both think about, and understand, that their digital communication is public and therefore needs to be professional.
Here is the actual advisory:
I will end in saying, ‘well done’ to the Ontario College of Teachers!
And again, my apologies.
Kind regards,
David Truss
ps. Special thanks to Ontario teacher Lorna Costantini @lornacost for questioning the news article’s interpretation and for pointing me to the sources provided above.
An open letter to the Ontario College of Teachers re: Social Media Fears
*Updated post and apology letter:
I request that you please go to my link above for clarification on this post.
Thanks to Ontario teacher Lorna Costantini @lornacost for questioning the news article’s interpretation and for pointing me to the sources provided in the link above, and in the 6th comment below.
____________________________________________
Ontario teachers advised not to tweet with students
By The Canadian Press, cbc.ca, Updated: April 12, 2011 6:44 AM
Social media may be the new frontier of communication but not between teachers and students.
The Ontario College of Teachers says teachers should avoid connecting with their students on Facebook or Twitter.
They are also told to avoid contacting them on LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.
The college issued an advisory to maintain professional boundaries, saying it’s vital to the public trust.
It also says some members have groomed a student for sexual purposes, using electronic messages to win their confidence.
via news.ca.msn.com
Dear Ontario College of Teachers,
I’ve read the article above, and you have one thing worthy to note in your statement: “The college issued an advisory to maintain professional boundaries, saying it’s vital to the public trust.”
However, as a professional, I thought that was self-evident.
Beyond that your statement is nothing less than counterproductive!
You see, by removing educated professionals from the pool of participants who can actually ‘TEACH’ students about appropriate social media use, you invite students to be influenced, and bullied, and taken advantage of by less scrupulous people… including your members who are less than professional and likely to avoid your advisory anyway.
What’s vital to the public trust is that they trust teachers to be current and to teach students to communicate and relate to the current world they live in… or should we still be teaching students to use quill pens?
*Updated post and apology letter:
Beyond Good ~ Seth’s Blog: Moving beyond teachers and bosses
We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a ‘good student.’
We train employees to deal with bosses in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to do. Figure out how to do exactly what they want, with the least amount of effort, and the last risk of failure and you are a ‘good worker.’
Good enough is not good enough!
So many things about the structure of our schools today promote this… promote the next generation of worker bees who drone on and do ‘what needs to be done’ instead of ‘what’s possible’.
How do we UN-standardize our schools?
It starts with the smallest of points…
“A paragraph ‘needs’ to have 5 sentences.”
… Which produces a class full of mediocre 5 sentence paragraphs.
To the biggest of points…
“I can’t“
… Whether this is a response from a teacher or a student.
As Seth says at the end of his post: “The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss as teacher as taskmaster as limiter mindset…”
What are our students capable of if we foster their creativity and get tests and curriculum and scheduled blocks and ‘busywork due the next day’ out of the way?
How do we move beyond educators as taskmasters?
Good enough is not good enough!
