The UniServity cLc and Web 2.0
Safe internet use requires balancing perceived benefits against acceptable risks
“The danger to kids in Web 2.0 comes less from what they may find online than from what they themselves put online... Even if social-networking sites are effectively blocked in schools, most students will still access them. To think that simple Internet filters will eliminate or even minimize the real risks associated with social networking is a dangerous misconception.
The Key to implementing Web 2.0 in your school
A safe and secure Web 2.0 Container
The UniServity cLc is has the capacity to place authenticated learners into safe and secure communities with access to a suite of familiar Web 2.0 social networking tools, allowing them to establish meaningful, relevant and authentic learning relationships with partners with different skills, opinions and backgrounds, so that they can collaborate in discussions, share tasks, review and assess each other’s published work and co-construct knowledge, arriving at a shared understanding and deep learning in alignment with core skills and standards.
It will take educating students about the appropriate use of Web 2.0 to genuinely protect them. The most effective answer to the problems of inappropriate Internet use, online predators, and cyber bullying is education.” Doug Johnson, Director of Media and Technology Mankato Area Public Schools, Minnesota UniServity cLc:All of your favourite Web 2.0 applications safely contained in one secure environment.
Secure access to the cLc’s comprehensive suite of C21st social learning tools, the capacity to create, manage and connect additional communities along with the ability to safely integrate commonly used open source Web 2.0 applications offers teachers and learners unique opportunities to safely rehearse and develop their skills, knowledge and understanding of Web 2.0 technologies and their application for safe and responsible learning; allowing schools to safely leverage the full potential of these resources for all members of their communities. The ability to belong to multiple learning communities, each with their own defined points of contact allows learners to break free of the constraints of the traditional classroom, supplementing and transforming existing practice by extending access to learning opportunities beyond the traditional school day irrespective of time and location.
“It takes a village to educate a child” Ashanti proverb
In today’s global economy it has never been more important to move beyond the village, to embrace opportunities that exist beyond our classrooms and to give young people the skills they need to create their own partnerships, form dynamic learning
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Digital Citizenship
“Web 2.0 applications can be powerful educational tools for teachers, offering a fundamentally different online experience for students. The shift we are seeing to more active engagement, contribution and collaboration online is enabling teachers and their students to create vibrant learning communities more reflective of contemporary society.” Dr. Helen Soulé, executive director, Cable in the Classroom
relationships, and access learning within a global context, affording them the opportunities essential to the development of empowered digital citizens, able to safely make use of familiar C21 technologies and strategies with new purpose, for new and diverse audiences and relevant learning opportunities.
Example 1: St Anselm School, Brooklyn
Grade 4 students in New York teaching their peers about pollution in their locality.
The videos have been embedded into the cLc using Motionbox within a cLc discussion forum.
“Even if socialnetworking sites (like MySpace and Facebook) are effectively blocked in schools, most students will still access them. To think that simple Internet filters will eliminate or even minimize the real risks associated with social networking is a dangerous misconception. It will take educating students about the appropriate use of Web 2.0 to genuinely protect them.”
Visibility of the movies and the capacity to participate in the discussion is restricted to members of the class and authenticated communities from other schools in New York, Hong Kong and the UK who have been connected to this project and invited to give feedback and to offer their own perspective on the issues raised in the movies based upon their own localities. Responses from Hong Kong students. All contributions to any cLc communities and resources are tagged with the time, date and user name of the person who published their work, making students accountable for all learning transactions. The tagging also allows students to search for contributors by name using the cLc User Directory. This directory is defined by the individual school or teachers and it defines not only who the students can collaborate with but the form that the collaboration may take,allowing schools to define the extent of their learning communities on a
70% of school districts responding to a CoSN survey block social networking sites yet value online collaboration.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Safety through empowerment
“Keeping children and young people safe from harm must be the priority and responsibility of us all. However, children need also to be able to learn, have new experiences and enjoy their childhoods, so we need to strike the right balance between keeping children safe and allowing them the freedom they need.”
UK Govt Department for Children Schools and Families 2008
day to day basis according to the demands of the curriculum and the opportunities presented.
Secure Social networking
The cLc provides each student with their own online ePortfolio, containing a personal homepage space where students can present themselves as individuals to their prescribed learning network and where they can communicate and share resources, blogs, forums, wikis, podcasts, quizzes and permitted open source Web 2.0 applications. Example 2: Managing and empowering Schools create the User Directory for their students, defining the scope for student collaboration, communication and sharing via their personal ePortfolio spaces
“Online Forums, Blogs, Podcasts and Wikis are familiar online social networking tools. Learners are able to use these tools to enhance their learning experiences within the secure cLc environment. The cLc is intuitive as students are already working with tools with which they are already familiar. The students are driving the technology forward”
Sharon Upton, Technology Advisor, Park House School
Students can then use their User Directory to search for accessible community members.
In the following example, a Year 9 student has adapted his personal space to reflect his growing maturity as a reflective learner. Diego is a typical student at John Adams High School. He has a well developed personal space as part of his cLc ePortfolio and his teachers have established partnerships with classrooms in Singapore, Hong Kong, Texas and the UK. His ePortfolio has been designed by the school as a template pushed to all students in Years 7-9, allowing comparisons to be made, particularly with regard to the way resources are stored. All students have permissions set to enable collaboration between partner schools. Teachers of some subject areas have placed their students into study groups. Diego maintains a learning journal and actively seeks feedback from his peers using forums, surveys and blogs. He can elect to publish to a wide audience as defined by his teacher and engages in regular dialogue with his teachers and parents. He has been encouraged to establish his own virtual study groups for different subjects, connecting him to personal collaborators from his school and schools in other parts of the world.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
“Leadership for Web 2.0 in Education: Promise & Reality” CoSN 2009
Cheryl Lemke and Ed Coughlin, Metiri Group
Diego has a link to his ‘Buddies” area in his ePortfolio. He has embedded a Slide.com guest book to connect to his authenticated friends around the world.
“One of the barriers to adoption of Web 2.0 is that districts are focused more on the problems associated with the technologies than on figuring out how to leverage the technologies to use in education” “The nation’s school district administrators are overwhelmingly positive about the impact of Web 2.0 on students’ lives and on their education.” Over 77% of district administrators concurred that “Keeping students interested and engaged in school is the top priority for Web 2.0 use in American schools.” While there was broad agreement that Web 2.0 applications hold educational value, the use of these tools in American classrooms remains the province of individual pioneering classrooms. Web 2.0 is outpacing K-12 education’s current capacity to innovate.
A teacher prescribed template allows him to organise his work to facilitate comparison and collaboration
Link to Diego’s Study Groups on his personal Home-space allows him to directly access his learning partners via their personal spaces.
In Mathematics, Diego is connected to students in his own class but also to Yiu Lung Kwan, a math’s student in Singapore As a native Spanish speaker, Diego is in a study group which includes other native speakers and a high attaining student from the same school. For a climate project Diego has selected his own learning partners for project based work. He has included Yiu Lung and a student from Hong Kong, who like him is interested in creating art from recycled materials. Additional examples of ePortfolio spaces of students in different grades are available in Appendix 1.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Web 2.0 Challenges v Web 2.0 Opportunities
Web 2.0 will engender a cohesive blend between formal learning in schools & informal learning off Campus (86% district administrators) “One of the barriers to adoption of Web 2.0 is that districts are focused more on the problems associated with the technologies than on figuring out how to leverage the technologies to use in education”
Integration of the cLc addresses the dilemma faced by schools considering the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies regarding how to allow students to engage in productive and creative social learning activities such as these, with a diverse range of learning partners, collaborators, audiences and assessors whilst protecting them from undue risks. All cLc users require authentication and individual schools set their own parameters regarding the nature of potential collaboration, defining who individual members of their community can communicate with, search for and view. Schools are able to plan the form such collaborations might take in line with school policies and they are able to manage the capacity of their members to collaborate with other authenticated learners drawn from the UniServity worldwide community of 2.5 million authenticated users.
“How can we have teachers and administrators teaching kids about social media when they can’t access it in school?”
Danah Boyd
“Web 2.0 technologies are as vital to young people’s everyday lives as the family telephone was in the past... ...In approaching Web 2.0 spaces, the important thing is to minimize vulnerability to significant harm without sacrificing the potential for learning and collaboration.”
Colin Lankshear
Example 3: Students in Brooklyn collaborated with students in the UK to create their own Internet use policy using a discussion forum to collect responses and a wiki collectively construct the final product. .
Students in each school then used the cLc survey tool to create an online agreement requiring a response to each agreed statement. The results were printed out as a spreadsheet, providing teachers with an account of each student’s response to every aspect of the agreement.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Making Schools Relevant
“Today's digital natives (our students) expect to communicate, learn and explore their world using technology 24/7. To keep up with them, to meet their learning preferences and to engage them in the learning process, we need to make schools relevant to them. We cannot do that without keeping up with technology and Web 2.0.”
A Curriculum Director in New York
The cLc promotes student accountability. Schools are rightly concerned about cyber bullying and posting of inappropriate material but when using the cLc schools can educate students to develop appropriate web etiquette, facilitated by the fact that every contribution made on the cLc is tagged with the student’s name and the exact time of posting. The knowledge that conversations are being held in full view of peers and teachers encourages students to adapt and rehearse behaviours in a bid to learn how to recognise when social networking becomes risky or unacceptable. The most effective solution to the problems of inappropriate Internet use is education, and the cLc provides an appropriate arena for transforming ‘Digital Natives’ into digital citizens. In enriching the cLc ‘Learning Village’ in this way every piece of work submitted, no matter how small gains new levels of importance given an audience of peers rather than the traditionally exclusive contract between teacher and student. Example 4: Global Digital Citizens Students from Denton, Texas collaborated with students in Anhui province, mainland China and the UK. The project aimed to offer students global perspectives on national news. This screen shows students from all 3 nations using a wiki to view President Obama’s Inauguration speech. Each nation posted their response in their national areas and the students could capture all opinions from around the world which they then used to inform their written assignments which asked them to write an open letter to the new President telling him how this important day in history made them feel, what it meant to them personally, to their country and to the rest of the world.
“The traditional way we ‘do school’ will change as students have more access to the world around them. If we are producing globally competitive students, we have to adapt to the world they will encounter.”
An Urban Superintendent
“I find the cLc is really cool to use. It can help different communities to communicate. I enjoy the online debates with our partner school in Hong Kong”
Jodi, Grade 11
Students from Texas uploaded a video in response to forum entries from students in China
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.1 Article 13 declares that:
“The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.... ..the exercise of these rights may be subject to certain restrictions, “…but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary: (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others b) For the protection of national security or of public order ,or of public health or morals.” In a recent CoSN survey, over 50% of district administrators reported that their filtering systems were more restrictive than that required by the federal policies.
Challenging Inequality
Similarly, the cLc empowers schools in developing approaches that address the divide between the technologies used in the home and those permitted in the school. Evidence indicates that young people are actively engaging with a wide range of Web 2.0 activities which in many cases have become part of their daily routines. This is creating a new digital divide between students who are Web 2.0 confident and those whose experiences are limited to the use of the web for content retrieval. In many schools, the move to enhance learning and teaching through the application of Web 2.0 is demonstrating significant gains. However, these are to be found in the classrooms of enthusiasts and innovators who often lack the capacity to implement system wide change, thus exacerbating the issue of inequality. The cLc allows school leaders to narrow the digital divide by ensuring that the innovative use of web 2.0 reaches every student and is school-wide rather than in isolated pockets accessible by small groups and therefore further restricted in its potential for learning as it fails to include the potential that exists within the entire community.
Capacity Building
In addition to providing the technology solution, UniServity has developed an award winning effective implementation approach. This has been distilled from direct working relationships with school leaders and educators and thousands of on-site school visits. This approach includes a framework and consultancy model, the “Roadmap to Success”, which supports school leadership teams in effective transformational implementation of our cLc Learning Platform in line with school priorities, the broad curriculum and State standards. A key feature of this offering is “The Learning Matrix” which maps pedagogy and school improvement issues onto the Learning Platform. The starting point for all schools is in using the cLc to address existing areas of development, starting with a pilot team of innovative practitioners including traditional classroom Web 2.0 enthusiasts, whilst extending learning opportunities to all members of the school community. Furthermore, UniServity works closely with education districts to establish professional learning communities for teachers, connecting them to relevant peers, mentors, experts and resources using the same Web 2.0 environments and tools as their students.
A professional learning community in New York sharing resources, an innovative district wide collaborative project, training, ideas and examples of best practice from within the district.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Risk Management
Schools are beginning to extend their bullying policies to include the internet: “…a couple of instances of online bullying but this is seen by senior management as a bullying issue and not an IT issue.”
Technology co-ordinator from Web 2.0 School
(Progression through the Roadmap supports teachers in developing from Early or developing Tech on the Texas Teacher STaR Chart to Advanced or Target Tech.) For many educators, using the cLc will be their first recognised steps into using Web 2.0 in the classroom. With this in mind, UniServity supports schools and districts in creating innovative pilot projects alongside global projects that have been created by UniServity’s education team in partnership with schools, districts and learning focused organisations around the world. These projects provide an immersive environment wherein teachers and students can experience the educational benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking and collaboration before applying aspects of what they have observed and learnt to their own practice. Example 5: UniServity’s “It’s a Small World” global collaborative Web 2.0 rich project for k-2 students and teachers.
“We’ve had instances, as every school, of things being posted onto YouTube that we’ve had to tackle… If in the past bullying has been a word in a playground or a name written in a book, well, all it is now is a posting on a website. You don’t have to be scared. All you have to do is to say, here is a piece of evidence, you did it, we’ll now proceed just as we would in any other case. The thing with Web 2.0 is that it is not removable. And it sits there. I think that will be the issue that society needs to think through.” Vice Principal
from Web 2.0 school
Risk management
Schools and districts have a number of responses to Web 2.0 and these tend to be restrictive rather than supportive; reactions to the perceived risks associated with Web 2.0 rather than responses to the challenges and opportunities presented for teaching and learning. These are best explained by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) as ‘dimensions of difference’ Of these there are two polar extremes: 1. Lock Down: Access to web 2.0 is blocked in school. Children receive mixed messages as teachers point them to resources they can ‘use at home’ and many find ways to undermine the system, presenting further ethical challenges and resulting in a deepening of the disconnect between home and school. Students are provided with information on internet safety but without opportunities to rehearse and learn.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
UniServity cLc:All of your favourite Web 2.0 applications safely contained in one secure environment
Wikis Blogs Forums Podcasts ePortfolios RSS Webquests Collaboration Discussion Tools Tasks Assignments
2. Open Access: Unrestricted access to web 2.0 sites in school. Emphasis on trust and self control. Idealistic approach that is inherently difficult to manage and open to abuse from within and beyond the school community. Neither of these approaches supports students and teachers as they fail to address the central issue of empowerment. Students have open access at home and schools have a responsibility to develop their skills, knowledge and understanding as digital citizens who can reap the rewards whilst understanding and avoiding the risks.
Source: “Leadership for Web 2.0 in Education: Promise&Reality.” CoSN Cheryl Lemke and Ed Coughlin, Metiri Group The cLc provides a scalable solution to the dilemma; offering access to a secure set of Web 2.0 essential tools housed within a safe and secure community which can be expanded, contracted and managed by individual schools. This ‘walled garden’ approach empowers teachers and students to embrace Web 2.0 tools within the moderated cLc learning environment, allowing students to rehearse, experiment and develop their proficiencies as informed digital natives. It allows schools to plan for progression as students are increasingly permitted access to more diverse communities, collaborators and partners from within and beyond the school based upon the requirements of the curriculum and the desire to remove barriers to learning in a controlled manner where the rules and opportunities are clearly understood by all. Whilst web 2.0 purists may object in principle to walled gardens as restrictive, it is safe to say that when the walled garden is made up of circa. 2 million authenticated teachers and learners from K-12 drawn from diverse communities, countries, races and religious backgrounds; with different strengths and perspectives, that the UniServity global community of learners provides a sufficiently large and complex audience for any learner’s work. Progress towards the ‘open access’ model can be planned accordingly as the cLc allows schools to make additional open source web 2.0 sites available to students, secure in the knowledge that students recognise that they are accountable for all of their actions within the cLc environment and that their actions are monitored not just by teachers and administrators but by an increasingly aware and empowered student body.
UniServity
www.uniservity.com
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Appendix 1: Personalized spaces
Fig1. One teacher’s professional ePortfolio. In this example, a technology teacher manages her personal space on the cLc. She is able to search for, collaborate and share files and folders with other teachers and students within and beyond her school. She maintains a public facing resource area accessible by teachers that she has chosen to publish to and she has incorporated a selection of additional Web 2.0 applications into her personal Home-space. She is maintaining cLc learning blogs and she is sharing the outcomes of some of her ongoing professional development; all via links on this one page.
Fig 2. A student uses her ePortfolio, including video, podcasts and blogs to communicate with her peers in the US and abroad using French, German and English.
Fig 3. A grade 5 student maintains his personal learning blog. He has chosen to publish it to his peers for review.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Fig 4: A Grade 6 Student uses an avatar to represent herself on her personal homepage. She has added links to samples of work, favourite web sites and her study groups for Mathematics and social studies. She has also embedded a video of Jesse Owens along with a personal response. She is connected to a school in Singapore where she is part of a group of students exploring solutions to global warming.
Fig 5. Ellie, Grade 3. Ellie's teacher has placed a ‘thinking hats’ survey onto her student’s homepages, allowing them to review their performance when collaborating in groups. All members of the group are able to view the outcomes.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Appendix 2: Combining Web 2.0 Applications in one authenticated secure space.
The capacity to combine proprietary and open source Web 2.0 applications for pre selected authenticated audiences, in a safe, secure and moderated environment with opportunities to respond with feedback, presents unique learning opportunities for students of all ages. Fig 1: K1 A Grade 1 teacher used the cLc to share a YouTube clip with his class. The children could watch and hear their class book being read aloud by the author. They used the sound recorder to ask questions of Max with students from a grade 3 class responding in character.
Fig 2. Grade 2 students used Myworld66 to plot countries visited by their parents and grandparents. They also use Bubblr to send and receive digital postcards from a partner school in Hong Kong at the start of each month.
Fig 3. This Middle School has added a Google Weather widget, a news feed from the BBC and a slide.com show created by a partnered school in Hong Kong.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com
Fig 4. A German department in a Texas High School has linked connected their cLc community with their partner school in Berlin. The students share news and calendar events and they upload videos and podcasts for peer review. A Google map has been embedded to show the location of the participating schools
Fig 5. Three High Schools in Texas are connected via a literacy project. Parents are being recruited to produce and share podcasts to provide access to key areas of the text for Second Language Learners and the students can make use of forums to discuss the novel and wikis to share perspectives on each of the main characters.
Once the character studies have been completed, the teachers will paste them into Wordle to create a word cloud displaying a district wide response to each character.
© UniServity Ltd. 1999 – 2009
Phil Stubbs Dir of Educational Development www.uniservity.com