Implementation
I’m not sure who the powers-that-be at my school are. I rarely ask for permission to do anything and am scarcely called on the carpet for it. That’s not to imply that I’m doing all sorts of radical experiments in my classroom, but I do not see the need to request permission to bring Web 2.0 into the classroom. The district has filters on what we can access; anything we can get to for my class that the censors allow to me is fair game. One of the things students need to learn is how to filter and decide what is appropriate on their own. I actually preferred it when we had no filters. Yes, a few students make some mistakes, but most learned from their errors quickly and those that did not I used to show the rest of the students the unpleasant consequences of repeatedly making bad choices.
Introducing the site was simple enough. Early in the second week, I took all my students to the site using the 20 class computers in my room. I showed them how to get to it, what pages were included, how to move between pages and sites, and explained why they should use it. Most of my students are only accessing it during class time at this point, but hopefully this will change. Especially now that I showed a PowerPoint presentation that included my website to all the parents who came to Open House last week. Hopefully they will encourage their children to be regular visitors.
