Friday, March 03, 2006

Local connections

Have had a little email exchange recently with Conn McQuinn, a nearby ed-tech leader I've known for many years. Conn mentioned my classroom blog in a workshop he recently offered, and asked teachers to send comments to my kids - to encourage, reinforce, etc - their writing. Kind of like what Wesley Fryer suggested teachers of teachers should do in his podcast... Several of my kids received comments from Conn's group and were so excited! One of my kids even mentioned the comments I received from the group of teachers - they DO read beyond their own blogs - even in third grade. Anyway, it has been a great lead-up week to Family Internet Night, next Tuesday. Gotta get busy on the "presentation" this weekend.

2 comments:

Wesley Fryer said...

Best of luck with your preso Mark, I hope you'll share resources afterwards. I don't have a ton on this, but I have a few Internet safety related links on:

http://del.icio.us/wfryer/InternetSafety

Mike Ribble is doing a lot of work at Kansas State on the topic of digital citizenship that might be of interest / relevant to your upcoming discussion with parents as well. His blog is on:

http://dcitizenship.blogspot.com/

The Digital Citizenship website he is collaborating with others to create and maintain is on:

http://coe.ksu.edu/digitalcitizenship/

Internet safety is a subset of digital citizenship, according to the work Mike and others are doing. There is a great article on "Digital Citizenship at All Grade Levels" in the March 2006 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology by ISTE.

Mark Ahlness said...

Chris, I hope to have my presentation available here next week. Good luck with your class!

Wesley, thanks for the wonderful links. Safety resources for parents are definitely my short suit. I do hope to share the PowerPoint presentation, and I'm looking around to see if a parent has a voice recorder - just in case it's worthy of a podcast. - Mark