Facebook Backs Off

Found this when I checked facebook just now:

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Twitter is Looking Better and Better

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”

Via Ed Champion.

BTW, after joining twitter ages ago I’m finally getting into it.  I’m here if you want to follow me.

The Fortress of Solitude, Where Art Thou?

Now I’ve been happily connected on-line for almost two decades now. I love being able to write emails, posts, tweets, and status updates and love to read everyone else’s.  Yesterday, as usual, I was up early. Someone on facebook wondered about this and we had a friendly little thread of comments before moving off to our days. So there is  Virginia Heffernan in today’s NYTimes considering the art of the status update — the clever one versus the lame one.  Those elegant little tidbits we have to couch in 140 characters (that is the twitter limit) or less.  And it is all about connection, about social networking, about others.

What I think is less considered, especially among educators who are excited about these new technology tools, is the importance of solitude.  Being someone who needs a lot of it (a quirk of the introvert), I feel strongly that I need to train my students in the art of being alone even as I train them in the art of being together.  And so I appreciated Neil Swidey’s Boston Globe article, “The End of Alone.” While that title sounds a bit emphatic I think he has some good points in the piece, points that reinforce things I’ve been thinking about already.

For example, I constantly wonder what being a Peace Corps volunteer today is like. When I was in Sierra Leone in the md-70s our only contacts with home were with bi-weekly letters (and since they saved them, I’ve still got the ones I wrote my parents and grandmother).  No phone so I did not make a single phone call in two years.  Now I’m guessing calls are constant, email and twitter and facebook — all going on to keep you connected.

And because I think it is so important I do what I can to train my students to be alone.  Of course they can’t be literally alone in our overcrowded school, but I can insist on an intellectual solitude.  I do this by requiring them to spend whole periods writing or reading without any interaction with anyone else.  I don’t talk to them while this is happening and they aren’t allowed to talk to each other either. If they are writing, I might wander around the room peeking at what they are doing, but usually I don’t because I don’t want to distract them, I want them to live alone with their work. To tolerate the lack of instant feedback.  To consider the work, the book they are reading, the story they are writing,  on their own.

I suspect that I’d be a lonely girl if there was no online world for me.  Being able to connect intellectually with other likeminded folk has been fantastic for me. But I still need my solitude — time when I’m off line, ruminating, mulling things over. (Right now I’m lame and can’t run or walk which is driving me crazy — those are my favorite times of solitude and I hope to get them back soon. Soon.)  In education, especially those who are eager to use new technologies, it seems to be so much about social networking, about connecting.  Where, I sometimes wonder, is the purposeful disconnect?

k12online

I only wish I had more time to spend at this wonderful online conference. As regular readers of this blog know, I’m smittened with Web 2.0 and am eagerly using more and more of the tools in my teaching. Blogs, podcasting, and more. The schedule and links to archived presentations is here. I have been following blogs of several of the presenters for some time now. While I do feel we get a bit carried away with technology (had these feeling decades ago when I was deeply part of the Logo subculture), much of it is really incredibly exciting. I’m having so much fun with podcasting right now and have plans to use other new tools this year (as well as give my students their own blogs come January as I did last year).

 

Interview with Me, the Technologist!

It is over at Amy Bowllan’s Blog at School Library Journal and more about my history as an educational technology person and my doing blogs and so on and so forth. Thanks, Amy, for the opportunity!

Teaching with YouTube

I’m discovering that YouTube is a very neat teaching tool. Here are a few ways I have or plan to use the site:

1. A few weeks back Fuse #8 posted the results of her search on YouTube for Alice in Wonderland clips. Of course, I immediately had to check out what she had found and then go farther. Several hours later I had a bunch of really neat clips and a blog post to boot. The following day, as we are studying Carroll’s book right now, I showed a few of them to my class. It was so, so cool! They especially loved the the old commercials and “Betty Boop in Blunderland.”
2. In years past I’ve avoided showing my class any of the live action Alice features, not being a fan of most of the child-friendly ones. (There are some interesting dark ones, but I wouldn’t show them to my 4th graders.) This year we’ve gotten into a routine of watching old and/or obscure movies during lunch (starting with Charlie Chaplin) and so I decided to show them some of those live action movies as they will be doing a quazi-anime themselves in April. Watching these films could help them figure what doesn’t work well as well as what does. As we watched one from 1985 I commented that Natalie Gregory, the young girl playing Alice, looked a bit like Shirley Temple. Surprisingly, several kids knew who she was and agreed with me. As the movie went on, I quietly went to my laptop and search YouTube for “Shirley Temple.” Immediately, a bunch of familiar clips appeared. When the movie was over I connected the laptop to the Smartboard (I’m SO lucky to have all this amazing technology to teach with) and showed the kids the results of my search. The kids who knew Shirley urged me to show certain clips (e.g. “Animal Crackers in My Soup”) to the class. All were fascinated and then agreed that Gregory indeed looked and acted very much like Temple.
3. Our big class project on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will be a quazi-anime video. In years past I’ve put them on our website. (Here’s one from 2002.) This year I plan to have the kids put them on our class blog and now also plan to put them on YouTube. Any reason why not? The kids will be thrilled, I know!

Teaching with Blogs: Podcasting Literary Salons

A favorite weekly event in my classroom is Literary Salon. A couple of kids bring in baked treats, I provide juice, and a bunch of the kids do prepared readings from books they are reading or have recently finished.

We all love it. Yes, they love the treats, but they also genuinely love both reading aloud and listening to each other. Every child participates. Because they prepare the readings ahead of time there is none of the halting-stumbling-over-words that occurs in round-robin reading (which I hate and never do). Some of the best readings come from some of the weakest readers because they’ve taken the most time to prepare.

One lovely result is that children become intrigued by the readings and eagerly go off to find the books in question to read. The cross-pollination is delightful! With the introduction of our blogs we’ve been able to podcast these events. So far we’ve done two. Please do check them out here and here. (And comment please — the kids are so eager for comments!)

Yesterday we did a very special Literary Salon. Poet Natasha Trethewey had come a few weeks ago to inspire the children to write Amistad poems. And yesterday they recited those poems to her. You can see their poems here and hear their recitations here.

Teaching with Blogs: Guests from the “Old Country”

My school has a sweet combination of townhouses for our K-3 division and a rather more daunting looking 12 storey building that houses our 4-8 middle school and 9-12 high school. To help our 4th graders with this huge transition (from a cozy small place full of little kids to a very big place full of huge kids) we contrast our study of American immigration with their “immigration” from the “old country” of Little Dalton to the “new country” of Big Dalton.

Today, a few weeks after receiving their”Big Dalton Citizenship” in a lovely ceremony, my 4th graders took their first official trip back to that “old country.” There, in addition to visiting old teachers and noticing how small everything suddenly seemed, they did something quite wonderful, I thought. That is, they hosted their 3rd grade buddies on their blogs. Each buddy had prepared a paragraph about a wonderful service learning project they are doing (involving New Orleans) in their class and each 4th grader helped them type it, revise it if necessary, proofread it, and finally post it on their blog. Check them out here. And by all means comment!

Teaching with Blogs: Children Commenting

After each child posted to his/her blog, we invited them to comment on each others’ blogs. They had some idea of this already from the comments most had received on their amazon reviews (thanks, Chris!), they had written them in their journals, and so I felt confident that they would write them thoughtfully and sensitively.

But a different problem arose almost immediately — the social dynamics of the classroom being replicated in the commenting. That is, some children were getting multiple comments while others were getting none. As soon as I noticed this, I wrote each child a comment and arranged for each to comment on three other blogs; thus, each child will eventually have at least four comments on their first post.

This made me think about this interesting tension between our desire to give the children more freedom to write when and as they wish while also needing to be aware that by doing so we also give them the freedom to exclude by simply commenting on some blogs and not others. The children are aware of how to write the comments, they are kind and supportive. But this lifelong issue of inclusion and exclusion is much trickier, one I’m sure I’ll be grappling many times as I explore blogs in my classroom.

Teaching with Blogs: Our Launch

Yesterday we introduced the blogs to my 4th graders and they managed beautifully. Worried that the kids might get bogged down in technical troubles we had a whole crew of adults on hand to help, but all was copacetic. The children were patient, attentive, and did it all just as we had hoped. Afterwards Ellen (my technology teacher-partner) and I were floating on air!

The class was well prepared; all are fairly competent with computers as they’ve been using them pretty much their whole lives after all. This school year they’ve already done lessons on Internet searches (developed and taught by my librarian colleague, fairrosa), those amazon reviews, blog-like journal entries and responses, and lots and lots of writing.

Yesterday’s lesson was mostly to give them a sense of the blogs’ environments, how to log on, how to post/comment/read, and so forth. Each step went beautifully! Along the way we talked a lot about safety and security. As soon as Ellen and I are confident that they understand completely all aspects of these issues (e.g. never writing anything that might identify them or their classmates) and how to write comments on each others’ blogs (e.g. they need to be supportive always) we will make their blogs public.

Until then you can visit our class blog with our initial posts from yesterday on it. And stay tune for more on this topic!