Digital Citizenship

Saw this article on Facebook and just thought of our conversations about digital citizenship and the dangers or cautions of anything online.  I realize that many of you probably have already seen this, but if not, have a read. It is extremely interesting.

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/11/teacher-goes-viral-with-lesson-about-dangers-of-posting-online.html

Connecting Parents

I sat in a meeting this morning and one of the topics discussed was how to connect parents to schools.  I realize at the elementary level, this is fairly easy to do.  Parents come to Christmas concerts (are they still called that?), parent-teacher interviews, and any and all events that occur at the school (literacy nights, BBQ's, etc.).  How do we keep parents connected at the high school level?  In my experience, parents who are connected are the parents of the children who are doing excellently (on the sports teams, in the drama production, etc.) in school.  However, the parents who we need to connect with are the parents of the disengaged students.  They don't come to parent-teacher interviews.  They don't come to SCC meetings.  They don't come to extra-curricular activities.  In some/many instances, they don't even come with their child to register at the school.  How do kids see the value in a high school education when the support from home is such? 

I believe in many situations, the parents of these kids were disengaged in high school and/or dropped out of high school.  This is the "status quo" for high school education.   How do we break that cycle?  According to Putting Faces on the Data: What Great Leaders Do!, there are 14 parameters to successful change initiatives in schools.  One of these areas is connecting parents. 

If anyone has any great ideas to connect disengaged parents, I would love to hear it!

Knowledge

I'm intrigued by the slide tonight, "What is knowledge?".  Historically, I think knowledge was something that was acquired through some sort of mentor.  People learned from a knowledge giver, so to speak.  Knowledge was passed down from generation to generation through story and through experience.  Once the introduction of ink (in whatever form), stories could be told - and captured- through pictures.  Eventually, stories could be told, captured, and saved through permanent ink.  This allowed knowledge to be saved for longer periods of time; thus, stories can be told with some degree of consistency.  Of course, as I describe these first few steps of story-telling and acquiring knowledge, I realize that this took an incredible amount of time.  Frankly, this is where the capturing of knowledge was only a few short years ago (pre-digital age).  Capturing of knowledge has exponentially increased over the past 20 years.  Now, this is how knowledge was captured.  The digital age has allowed knowledge to be captured and stored in a completely different way.  But still, what is knowledge?

I believe the concept of knowledge has changed.  Once upon a time, it was "Who could acquire the greatest amount of knowledge?"  He who could capture the greatest amount was considered to have the most knowledge - and also was considered the 'smartest'.  Given the ease of finding knowledge in the digital age, I believe knowledge and intelligence are drastically different now. Knowledge is a click of the button but intelligence is what one can do with the knowledge which is easily obtained.  And, I believe knowledge and intelligence are things that ought to be shared.  Because they can be shared so easily now, truly, an intelligent person will share their knowledge. 

Connected Administrators

I think I have an idea for my major project (thanks to Alec).  I have been struggling with how administrators can get connected based on the number of unique situations we deal with on a daily basis.  I have learned that administration can be a very lonely role.  Many of these situations involve a level of privacy that we are just not at liberty to discuss with colleagues.  However, upon looking up connectedprincipals.com, I see that I was looking to narrowly when trying to see how I might be able to connect to my colleagues around the world.  As administrators, we are continually changing our role to that or instructional leader rather than school-based manager.  Although we still deal with a number of managerial tasks, we are increasingly being asked to lead our colleagues in the area of instruction.  When I looked through connectedprincipals.com, I saw that this is where the the connected principal truly lives.  Multiple opportunities to read about leadership from others, many stories of developing collegiality amongst a staff, many ideas about how to facilitate change in a profession that, at times, looks very similar to how it did 50 years ago.  This is where I can developed my connectedness. 

Not only am I learning about the value of connectedness, I am also learning the value in a story.  George Couros' TEDTalk found here, discusses this importance.  This has been a bit of a struggle for me as so much of graduate work is framed around peer-reviewed resources.  While writing a formal paper, your resources cannot simply be a "story" you heard, your own experiences, or an experience from someone else found on a social media website.  This has also been something I have struggled with and am now beginning to accept - Connected principals/teachers are about learning from others' stories (not peer-reviewed resources).  We learn so much from the power in a story.

Privacy Act - Legal Ramifications

I had the opportunity to attend a law session through my employer this past week.  I was intrigued by the presentation; in particular, when the lawyer indicated that the sharing of any information, digital or other, without the consent of the individual captured is considered a violation of the Privacy Act and is a chargeable offense.  It made me wonder, and question, the number of images/videos posted online that do not have the consent of all parties.  Is this violation of the Privacy Act similar to the violation of the law whereby one cannot spit in public?  It is considered a law but will never be enforced.  If so, why is it a law?  Or, if consent is needed, what does consent look like? Does it have to be written or is verbal enough?  And, how would one prove 'verbal consent'?  With the use of video cameras being so simple that a young child could use it and the ease of uploading images to the internet, it only seems obvious that images will be uploaded without consent of the captured individuals.  How will this be monitored?

This lends itself to the question of digital citizenship that we spoke of during class this week.  I believe it is so important for us to start teaching digital citizenship to our students as soon as they enter our school system.  Kids that are not in school already have the ability to use the technology.  I believe curricula need to reflect this ability and digital citizenship should be addressed as soon as they enter our schools.  We are doing kids an injustice if we expect them to simply "know" what is appropriate and what is not.  Additionally, we cannot expect parents to teach this because many parents have no idea of the power of technology.  It is our job to stay current with technology.