EDLD 5362 Week 5 Final Project

http://youtu.be/o5b6Ww1uSbY

EDLD 5362 Week 5 Reading Reflection

This week’s reading on web filtering caught my attention. This is such an important thing.  “A district can take many steps to ensure that its students are protected from harmful, obscene, or otherwise unworthy websites. It can establish guidelines for appropriate Internet usage, create acceptable use policies, or provide training for teachers.” We have all of this in place from the web content filter to the acceptable use policy to the trained teachers. Yet last week we had an issue at one of our elementary campuses.  A student typed in lesbian and the filter let everything through.  The teacher was mortified when she walked past the student’s desk and saw the website the student had up.  She quickly had the student close the screen and she called the technology department and asked them how this could happen.  It did happen and it happened because the district web security product vendor ran an update several weeks earlier and the default had been changed when searching through Google on what to allow through. As soon as the vendor was called they told the district about the update and the district changed the default back to block specific things.  My question was why would a vendor do something like that and not notify its users.  If you can’t trust your web filtering vendor, who can you trust? We have to have web filtering because there’s just too much out on the web. Unfortunately several weeks went by while this filter didn't work and we can only hope that not many students were affected by this and we wouldn't know without doing much research.  We have to be more careful to be checking for things in the future.

Ullman, E. (2009, July 23). Web filtering that works. Tech and Learning. Retrieved on November 17, 2009, from: http://www.techlearning.com/article/22092

EDLD 5362 Week 4 Reading Reflection

Wouldn’t it be sweet if we could all have a perfect technology classroom.  From this week’s reading, The Model of a Modern Technology Classroom, “Each year the program would recruit about 10 to 15 teachers, who would receive technology equipment for their classroom plus training on how to use the equipment and, most importantly, how to integrate technology use into the learning process.” The key to this statement is the ‘training’ that the teachers are going to receive.  Not every teacher is as literate in technology as every other teacher, but the training will be helpful.

Each teacher is going to have to embrace it and run with it.  I know in this reading they are talking about the program selecting the teachers and that’s great because the ones who yearn for the technology will stand out, but at some point, all teachers will need to be on this same page in order for them and their students to excel and keep up with other students.

Richard, V. (2007, April 1). The model of a modern technology classroom. Tech and Learning. Retrieved on November 17, 2009, from http://www.techlearning.com/article/7146