A dozen ways to teach ethical and safe technology use

Read this excellent blog post from Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog.

http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2010/12/26/a-dozen-ways-to-teach-ethical-and-safe-technology-use.html

Cheers

Ruth

Facebook privacy options

While going through our DER laptop student responsibilities with Year 9 last Friday, I touched on social networking and privacy.  At present, they can't access social networking on their DER laptops at home or at school, but this may change in the future; and right now, they certainly are using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Facebook Privacy: a bewildering tangle of options is a New York Times article with a detailed graphic illustrating just how many privacy options there are - and where - in Facebook.  On the one hand, it's complex enough to make lots of people (including students) toss up their hands and run in the other direction.  On the other hand, if you do, then the choice is letting far more information than you may wish or realise become public.

One to share with students and staff.

Added later, from Twitter:

• Will Richardson: Teach. Facebook. Now
• Are your Facebook privacy settings doing their job? Here are two tools and a slideshow to help you: http://bit.ly/cfbvDH  

Cheers

Ruth

DER laptops Year Two & Digital Citizenship

After a delightful time at the Mantle conference in Newcastle, it's been full steam ahead at school on the technology front, as our Year 9 Digital Education Revolution laptops are being distributed this week.  I've fished out my seven things to try week 1 list and will be going through that and the revised Student Responsibilities part of our school's laptop policy at a staff meeting.  Tomorrow, with the Year 9s, they get to Experience my PowerPoint on Student Responsibilities in period 1, before the handout begins.  I wonder if their eyes and ears will function? - they can't wait to get their laptops.

Word is that the NSW DER team are preparing teaching materials on digital citizenship which will be available next term, so if that's an area your school is looking at, it's good to know that resources are on the way.  If you need resources now, there's LOTS of digital citizenship material around on the net: eg. the nine elements at digitalcitizenship.net, BrainPop's animations and activities, and the Australian Government's Cybersmart website.

Cheers

Ruth

How to link/embed YouTube videos into PowerPoint 2007

Our DER laptops for Year 9 will be distributed at the end of the week, so I'm busy putting together the PowerPoint for the first period, on school rules/policy reminders.  The laptops will then be issued, period by period, and in the last period of the day, I've been asked to address the whole year group (200+ kids...)again, on 'stuff like copyright and things they need to know'.  So that's another PowerPoint, with the slightly more formal title of "Digital Citizenship".  (Rumpestilskin, where are you??? - two major PowerPoints to prepare in under a week...).

However endlessly entrancing I may find my own voice, and however utterly brilll-y-unt I may be at holding an audience of 200+ year nine students for nearly an hour... (twice in one day!) I know that there must be some great things out there on digital citizenship, cybersafety, copyright and so forth to add different voices/change the pace/keep their interest.  And there are.  I'll share some of them this week on the blog.

Having found some useful YouTube videos, my next challenge was working out how to put a YouTube video into a PowerPoint, because I haven't done that before.  Google google google and here's the most useful set of instructions I found.  It's from Clay's Blog, and specifically refers to PowerPoint 2007.    The Captivate animation to show you how has a broken link on the above page (it's his new site) but works on his old site - click here to see how-to, step by step.

My one variation is that I paste the original URL into the Note section of the PowerPoint slide for future reference, then paste it again to edit it as the instructions outline (I can delete this second one once it's in the Properties - the Properties Movie window where it has to go is teenytiny).  If this makes NO sense, read his instructions/watch the Captivate demo and then it will.

You still need to have the computer showing the PowerPoint being connected to the internet during the presentation - this links rather than embeds.  It still means that you don't have to clunk out of the Presentation and over to a browser, but just instead click on a Play button.

Hey! Something new I've learned how to do, and something to share with colleagues and the kids.

Cheers

Ruth