Our Students' Online Reality

A series of videos was published by PBS's Frontline earlier this year, beginning in January. The series was titled "Growing Up Online". The seven part series explores how the modern internet has transformed the experience of childhood.

The topics covered in this series include how much of a teen's life is lived online - and how much of that life is known to, or hidden from their parents. The second part of the series explores how school systems are trying to understand and relate to students who live lives outside of school that are often alien to their teachers. Several of the programs touch on some of the positives of this new online generation - one being the opportunity for creativity - often a kiss of death for a shy student in school - to thrive and prosper in an online environment. Also explored is the fear and myths about online predators, as well as a guide for parents trying to understand and cope with this new world their children are growing up in.

The Growing Up Online series is 7 parts long - with each segment being around seven to nine minutes long, so it is easy to view it in short segments. Although your home connection may struggle with this a little, you should have no problem viewing the segments at school.

For ANY teacher - Growing Up Online is a must see. This series offers a sometimes anxious, but often hopeful look at how our students are exploring and innovating within this new frontier.

How many blogs and other publications do you read? Do you RSS?

How many blogs, online newspapers or magazines, or other online publications do you follow? How many would you LIKE to follow, if it didn't take much time and was easy to do?

I read (scan is more like it) around 30 educational and edtech blogs, about 5 educational news publications, and 5 regular online news publications. I don't read the whole things, and I don't always check them every day. They are all so good I hate to think I might miss anything in them, so I subscribe to their RSS feeds to make sure I can scan quickly to see if there is anything pressing I really need to read.

IF, at this point, you are saying "What is an RSS feed?" welcome to this discussion which will show you how easy this is. If you are saying, "I have RSS feeds", then please check back in tomorrow and maybe I'll have something new for you!

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Knowing what it stands for doesn't help our understanding, so just forget that and remember "RSS". If you are reading any online publication that you enjoy, and in your browser bar you see this symbol;

then you can easily subscribe to that publication. Subscribing to their RSS feed simply means you can check their headlines whenever you want. They won't email you (you don't even give an email, a name, or sign in or up or anything), you don't pay, you won't get junk mail, and it takes about 5 seconds to subscribe.

I'll explain how I do this, because for me this is the easiest way to keep my publications in sight so that I remember to check my feeds.

First - I set up a folder right in my bookmarks toolbar (in Firefox) - just go to "bookmarks" and create a new folder right in the bookmarks toolbar menu - you can put it anywhere, but for me, keeping it in my bookmarks toolbar means it's right in front of my face. For starters, just name it "RSS Feeds". Later you may want to make several folders, depending on your reading habits - one for regular news, one for educational news, one for blogs, etc. The possibilities are probably endless.

Anyhow, lets start out with something simple - Education Week is a good publication that covers a lot of topics that are current in education. When you go to their site, you will notice that their browser window looks like this;

That little blue box at the end is their RSS feed button. This is the very most simple way to subscribe to a feed. Simply click that button. You will immediately get a little pop-up menu with a couple of items - usually they say "Subscribe to RSS", and "Add RSS as a live bookmark in Delicious". We learned a little about Delicious yesterday, but today we are just talking about very simple RSS - so as long as you are going to be storing it in that folder you made in your bookmarks toolbar, just click the option that says "Subscribe to RSS" (sometimes it will say "Subscribe to RSS 2.0"- also a good choice).

So, as soon as you choose the "Subscribe to RSS" option, a new page will immediately load, and at the top you will see this;

The folder you have created in your bookmarks toolbar is a "live bookmark", so you don't need to change this option. Just click the "Subscribe now" button. As soon as you do, this little window will pop up;

The blue highlighted portion is the title of the publication - it is highlighted because if you want to change it to a shortened form that is easier for you, this is where you can - you can also change it later in your bookmarks folder when you organize them. Underneath the name, is the part where you select your folder where you are putting this feed - in this case it will be the new folder you created in your bookmarks toolbar - so click that folder, then click the blue "add" button.

That's it! Now, when you click on that folder you created in your bookmarks tool bar called "RSS Feeds" or whatever you named it, you will see Education Week - when you roll your cursor over it, a list of the latest headline "feeds" will pop up with the latest at the top. You can now quickly peruse the headlines and click on the one that interests you - it will immediately take you to that specific article or post. How much easier could this be? You can put a lot of RSS subscriptions in your folder - I have 30 in my "EdBlogs RSS" folder alone and have room for more!

With my RSS feeds organized this way, I can very quickly scroll through all of the headlines of my favorite publications and pick and choose what I want to read (usually based on how much time I have available).

If you are new to this, here are some good "starter" feeds for your educational reading pleasure!
Edutopia, Alaska Education, and of course a very good blog I know of called EdTechSec (by now you may have noticed that little blue RSS button in the browser bar!).

New history textbook =$60: ushistory.org=free

We've surely all seen this day coming - the day when our textbooks become obsolete. Not just in the sense that they are old or outdated, but obsolete as in GONE - we don't need them any more.

I think that, theoretically, we could teach courses now without texts, but that would be a pretty big leap for some people who are still not comfortable with the technology. However, comfortable or not, I think that day is coming - and it will arrive more quickly than we probably ever guessed.

Many teachers already rely heavily on web resources to supplement their texts. In some cases the web IS already the text - the teacher must be a critical reader, compiler, and organizer of a wide range of information - but it is completely possible to put together a rich course curriculum this way.

A year or so ago I became aware of a site called Connexions. People (educators mostly) can contribute and freely use all of the content there. It is set up so that it is mostly scholarly in nature and meant to be used as a textbook type resource comprised of "modules". When it was first developed, there were were very few such sites of that magnitude. However, during the past couple of years, these types of shared sites have exploded. The content - and most of it very good content - is free and there for the taking.

A good example I recently heard about is ushistory.org. Their website has expanded considerably since first put up in 1995 and serves approximately 3 million page views monthly to almost 1 million visitors. The site receives approximately 22 million hits monthly.

Their latest addition is the U.S. History Online Textbook, which includes 60 chapters "From Pre-Columbian to the New Millenium".

This is a well-reviewed resource, and quite frankly, I have trouble seeing why schools and districts strapped for cash would be dishing out $60 for a quickly outdated textbook when all of this is FREE FREE FREE!

The current economic conditions may push schools and districts in this direction faster than any technology initiative ever could!