My Discussion about Kist's Book

Reading The Socially Networked Classroom by William Kist at first seemed like an argument for convincing teachers to use social media in the classroom.  Kist’s statistics about “the myth of a “safe” adolescence” (see pages 4 and 5) is convincing.  Many parents are so concerned about the protection of children that it has gotten unhealthy.  We need to show kids that they are capable of doing things otherwise they can think or expect that adults should make everything right for them.  I like the SOLO – Safety Online Outreach Society I would have found the stats more interesting if they had shown how teaching about cyber-bullying and online safety are helping to create online smart kids.  In short, show how we are making our kids more “street smart” on the internet.   

The letters at the back of Kist’s book helped me to form my own letter to send home to parents as we are about to blog on a wiki space.  The “Sample Letters to Parents” in the Appendix are long.  I can’t see or imagine my grade 3 students’ parent even wanting to read such a cumbersome letter.   

I created my own net etiquette after talking to the kids about what it means to be safe online and what cyber-bullying is.  westpine - pine's signature on net etiquette is the blogging site, the Wikispace my colleague and I have created for our collaborative project at our perspective schools.

The biggest thing that came to mind, as I read Kist’s book, was that I was past “short” and into “tall” but dabbling into “grande” and even “venti”.  The restriction for me is (and time is a restriction!) that I only have so much time with “borrowed” classes to do this stuff as I am a teacher-librarian, book exchange over rides most of my time.  I have to prioritize book exchanges as a first to do with my time.  And maybe even more restricting is that I am doing this with elementary school students who must learn how to log on, type and bring up their speed!  I know I have to bring up my speed and ease with this too but just like my students, we start somewhere and with practice and experience we will have something pretty good to work with in the future.

Readings:

"SOLO - Safety Online Outreach Society." SOLOS. Ed. David Antrobus. Creative Commons Attribution, n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2012. <http://www.safeonlineoutreach.com/about.php>.

Berson, Ilene R., Ph. D. "Making the Connection Between Brain Processing and Cyber Awareness: A Developmental Reality." SOLO - Safe Online Outreach Society. N.p., 2003. Web. 1 Oct. 2012. <http://www.netsafe.org.nz/Doc_Library/netsafepapers_ileneberson_cyberawareness.pdf>.