Voyage Coetail

flickr photo shared by dianecordell under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license After all the readings I have been doing so far for Course 2, my mind has been shifting from optimistic to pessimistic and vice versa. I’ve felt from old-fashioned to super geeky and vice-versa. I have been so focused on digital citizenship that I think I forgot the why: why do I want to integrate technology in my classroom? Matt Levinson said: Perhaps most important, remember the "why" of technology adoption and evolution. Philips Andover Head of School John Palfrey articulates this well in “Prepare Kids for the Digital Economy," a recent opinion piece for the Boston Globe : Technology has the power to engage students and make learning more fun. So much of learning happens outside of the classroom; we need to connect our in-school activities with our kids' out-of-school interests. By emphasizing creative tasks and experimentation, we can ensure that children see school in a whole

flickr photo shared by GotCredit under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license One of our key goals is to stop focusing quite so much on "do kids have computers in their classroom?" and start focusing more on "do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?" I completely agree with this quote from the framework of PLAY (Participating Learning and You). And I had to start by educate myself with these terms: Creative Commons, mashup and remix. I found out how they could unlock our creativity and most importantly I learned how they could fit in the classroom. My research led me to Common Sense Graphite website. I was very inspired by reading this blog post that was linked to a lot of great resources to teach my students those social skills and competencies. I had at a fingertip all the tools I needed, I just had to figure out how I will introduce the lesson to them. My Gr

Before starting my readings for this post, I was sure that I was fully managing my digital profile and therefore my privacy was respected. What makes me think that? As I explained in a previous post, ten years ago, I was a wannabe journalist. To promote myself I joined LinkedIn . As I wanted to grow my professional network and that I was on the look out for job opportunities, I used it to show case my works. So it made sense for me to be very careful about what to post online. Every once in a while, I checked my digital profile to make sure that I was easy to find and that there were no confusion. My full name is not that common. If you searched for it you were likely to find my LinkedIn profile and some articles that I wrote years ago. At the end of the search, you’d probably find this funny cartoon character from Brazil. This Magali has a passion for food! And then my surname gave approximate results with “brutal” so it linked to lots of news website. No worries that it could be me!

By now, we all have a digital footprint but is it a good thing or a bad thing? No need to look for a very long time to understand that every thing we do on the Internet is stored somewhere. We kept on hearing and reading that “The Internet is forever” . For me it seems that the Internet is the villain of the piece. If we misinterpret the message that the media send we could understand that the Internet is not a safe place, and that everybody knows everything about anybody including me! It also seems that even if I would stop right away to go online, erase all my accounts and activities, it wouldn’t be enough. That’s too late! Because all my friends would have post things about me. Should I become paranoid and should I feel worried about that? Shouldn’t I think the opposite? In the 21 st century, wouldn’t it be worst to not have a digital footprint at all? [caption id="attachment_95" align="aligncenter" width="186"] Image by Penny Bentley -Digital Footpri