Blogs and School Policy
There’s a lot of good arguments about having an acceptable use policy (AUPs) for the use of blogs in the classroom. While not a big fan of a list of do’s and don’ts, I like the idea of a document outlining rights and responsibilities. For every right there might be a commensurate responsibility. I also see value in creating such a document with the students who will be working with it. You’d be surprised about how astute kids can be around developing this type of stuff. You might also be surprised about how draconian kids can be in deciding upon sanctions for breeching such guidelines.
While on the subject I’ve read a lot of policy documents and often the most common response to breeches of guidelines particularly with computers and the Internet is removal of user privileges. The question is if computer based resources are really so essential to each child’s learning should using them be considered a privilege? I’m not saying whether or not this is right or wrong; in some cases I imagine it can be quite effective for a quick consequence for a wrong action, but might we be sending mixed messages here?
Anyway, in regards to AUPs in my experience it’s good to be proactive in these areas. In one school I worked at I had developed and implemented an Internet AUP that I felt was fair, balanced and was working well. When the controlling authority of the school produced a ’suggested’ Internet AUP which I thought it was heavy handed and unwieldy, I was able to go to my boss and say, “Look we’ve already got a policy that’s been in place and has been working well so we really don’t really need to run with this other one”. My boss was cool with that and so we kept the policy we already had in place.
If you want to explore the issues of polices for blogs in particular or other issues on blogs in general sus out Bud the Teacher’s wiki at http://budtheteacher.com/wiki/
The picture? Pearl Tower in Shanghai
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hi Mitch,
I tutor a Year 12 student in IPT and was gobsmacked a couple of weeks ago to hear that for playing games on the computer she had her login locked for 2 weeks. This meant she couldn’t use the PCs at school at all which meant she was not using a computer in her computing classes in the lead up to the half yearlies. There has got to be a better way. I agree that computers are not to be used for gaming except with specific leeway as a privilege but they could have come up with a better punishment - I think.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have any ideas as to what that punishment should be
Regards,
Amanda
April 24th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Unfortunately that seems to be the natural consequence for that type of particular action. Perhaps the only thing we can do is to make sure that we don’t do it when we’re put in a similar situation. We can’t change the world but we can change our little corner of it (BJ Hunnicutt M*A*S*H).