Suggestions for Using 2.0 tools with Students under 13
In response to a post on VTcite, I jotted down a few things I’ve learned working with kids & 2.0 tools, so I thought I’d share them here as well.
- Don’t use tools that require students to use a personal email address. (There are different ways to get around this, some sites like pbwiki now allow you to generate user logins for students. Edublogs will allow blog comments without email addresses, etc.)
- Preview drafts of student work & engage them in editing.
- The teacher should be the admin of the site and, depending on the project, require approval for posts.
- With blog projects, require students comment on each other’s posts. Encourage students to make comments brief, conversational and original.
- Protect their privacy by having students use pseudonyms and develop their online voice by always using the same pseudonym.
- Practice & teach respectful dialogue. (This does not come as easily as you would expect online. Tone is a challenge for new writers and kids love to use all caps and lots of exclamation points, they don’t realize they’re shouting.)
- Make it an assignment, not a suggested activity.
- Give students time in school to use the tool, do not expect kids to do it from home (remember the digital divide).
- Also use it as a fun time-filler for kids who finish other tasks early.
This is great! One of the challenges I have is to help librarians deal with the occasional student experimenting with “respectful dialogue” in anonymous online chat. I am trying to think about it in terms of what we can do to help skills kids need to become citizen-scholars and your list is helpful.
I am wondering about letting them create profiles on our site, to self-organize in to assignment-based or other interest groups (with a state-mandated curriculum, let students all over collaborate on their assignments) and to let them experiment with the librarian side of the chat interface.
I think a little openness will create some community standards that keep behavior problems to a minimum (I get this idea from Lawrence Lessig and some work published about Yahoo! Answers suggests it works), but ultimately I’m hoping to address the fact that we have more demand from kids doing homework than we can handle.
I’m realizing now that I should work explicitly with specific teachers and school librarians instead of sneaking a social networking site onto everyone. Teachers can introduce our service as an explicit part of an assignment, rather than what happens now is that we are introduced as an alternative research method, sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed, but we never really work with the teachers directly.
So I’m writing this on your blog instead of mine because I’m hoping you’d have some ideas of your own. ???
27 Jan 2009 at 2:17 pm
Caleb, that is one cool project. If I had a larger group of students, I’d love to have something like that – an online organizational tool with a little librarian built right in. I envy you the opportunity to help out so many kids, you’re the big picture guy.
All I can say is YES YES, you’ve got to work with the teachers as much as possible. The majority of students are not going to use reference tools that are not assigned, it’s simply not a priority for them. I know, kids these days – huh? When I was a kid I couldn’t wait to ask the nearest librarian for help finding the most comprehensive & reliable reference sources. And I walked through the deep snow to ask them, in the dark, with the flu.
Can I see this fascinating project at work? How do I get in? And can I send my kids to you when I don’t have the answers? (ok, just joking. I always have the answers).
28 Jan 2009 at 9:56 am
It’s in my brain for now. We’re on Drupal and I think all I have to do is plug in the right modules and make it look pretty. Yeah right. I am sort of waiting for the database component to show up. Yeah right. And to see how much life changes after the baby comes in March. Yeah right!!!
You can always send kids to us if they have questions about Oregon.
03 Feb 2009 at 2:26 pm