This was in my mailbox today...thought I would share it...any comments?
Hi everyone,
Need your help me to think through an idea. The issue: what's the best way to share student digital work? I'm all for blasting kids' digital creations onto the web at every possible opportunity; everyone knows that giving kids a worldwide audience results in higher engagement and performance. But there are downsides, too. Privacy requirements (full names etc.) are one. Do you post student work as-is? If you edit it, what does that do to its authenticity? What about students that miss or don't complete the assignment and don't have their work included with the rest of the class? Worse, what about parents that might be concerned about how their kids' work will look in comparison to others? Then there's the amount of work involved on our part to get everything published (presuming the kids don't do it themselves)...
In a perfect world, the school and community would be on the same page with regards to these issues and have a policy/practice/vehicle in place for sharing digital work products, all the needed infrastructure, and everyone (including the kids) would know how to use and access it. (Yes, I know, digital portfolios would do this but that is another conversation.)
My kids are grown, but as a parent when they were in school (especially elementary), I definitely wanted to know what they were working on with regards to technology and how they were developing skills-wise. Short of a paper or project sent home now and then, there wasn't much to help me make that determination. That said, I know there are/were parents for whom this just isn't an issue - for whatever reason, they are not interested in technology project work or it's not a priority. That's not to criticize - just stating what I think is a fact.
So here's my idea for a solution: emails to parents that request to see project work.
Everyone uses it. It's secure. It's personal. It allows a one-to-one connection that strengthens the bond between school and home. The question is how to leverage it?
I'm envisioning a Google Form (survey) that would be blasted out to parents when a project was completed. Wouldn't be EVERY time, only for major works. Parents could use the form to say "yes, send me my child's project" and maybe provide other needed/helpful information. Then, we as teachers would respond to those parents, using services like DropSend.com for large files (up to 2gb) and our school email accounts for everything else.
Sound like a lot of work to you? I have 525+ students and am willing to bet you that at any given time, the number of people who would want digital artifacts shared this way would still be very manageable, especially if we "rotated" so that there wasn't something major happening in multiple grades on any given week.
Let's face it: as much as we might like to think otherwise, chances are, the number of parents actually checking out the digital galleries, blogs, wikis, Voicethreads, websites and other creations we toil to create is probably a lot smaller than we think. Why not communicate DIRECTLY with those who are interested? This solution does just that. I think it would SAVE effort in the long run and result in better overall perception of the value of technology in schools. I also think it would be worth the effort.
What do YOU think? Am I nuts?
Kevin Jarrett
