Adding a Blog to the School Site

The school site with Surrey Schools, is well organized, especially if you're a parent.  All teachers listed, there, all assignments under the parents (the choice of the teachers to use this).   Under the parent  section it's easy to find what a parent would want to see.  But how do you tell if parents are coming to your site?  You can use a google tracker or other site analysis programs online.  But the easiest thing to do is use a blog.

Updates to our school site is constant, with the office staff taking a lead role, working in conjunction with the administration at our school.  One of our girls (Juanita) updates almost every day.  The main page is where she works the most but as I said we still don't know if parents are coming to it unless we ask for an analysis from our IT people.  Two years ago we had a blog attached to our old site and when we migrated over to the new system (SurreySchools.ca) we brought our blog with us. Take a look.  Most schools now have one.

Sullivan Heights is proud to be actively engaging in 21st Century technologies when communicating with our community.  As part of our efforts, we have discontinued our bi-monthly publication of large school newsletters (with the exception of our annual August mail-out) and instead we are using technologies which include Twitter (Our Twitter Feed), a news blog (News Blog) and our home page (Home).

We encourage our communicty to follow us in any of these systems and parents have responded with a 1000 emails now listed on BCeSIS for teachers to email parents any concerns, or just comments about their children.

Below is a list of views, today, yesterday, notice last month of our school blog and the total since we started this a year ago.  Notice our traffic, which is constant all day.  Many parents have signed up for the emails to their phones to keep in contact with our school.  They enjoy the fact that they can read the quick and easy blog text sent to their phones.

Traffice is from google, with people searching for Sullivan Heights, and as you can see most of our traffic is from Canada.  This is just one of many ways we keep in contact with our parents and students.  We even use tags so parents can look up specific entries that relate to what they want (i.e. dry grad).  I recommend this manner of communication to any school.

Reflections of Grade 9 Students....

OK, I'll admit right now, he's one of my "great" students (Your a genius!!! - from Terry Small @terrysmall).  But that's not why I've chosen to share the Eportfolio blog reflection of these students.  You'll understand why after you read the blog.

When my students entered my classroom  I had a youtube video ready for them to watch.  We've been working on Social Networks in my Information Technology 9/10 classroom, hoping to teach some understanding of the negatives and positives of these tools.  We use a lot of social networking at Sullivan Heights, web classrooms, blogging portfolios, and tweeting out homework, successes and updates of our school.  The idea is to teach the students about your digital persona but also to make sure they understand that no one controls the Internet and when you put something out on the net, there's no going back.

So here's one of the videos I showed students, and below it is the blog entry I requested.  I asked students to write 100 words or more about what they learned from the video.  This entry makes me smile with pride that a student went further then just reciting was he heard or saw, he analyzed the information and came up with his own conclusions.  He extended his knowledge, and applied the learning of MySpace to Facebook.  Read below and hopefully it will make you smile as well.  He's in Grade 9.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11064451/ns/dateline_nbc/t/why-parents-must-mind-myspace/#.UHbptcU0WSo

 "   This video mainly introduced what Myspace is, and the dangers in the use of Myspace. Myspace as a social networking site is convenient and easy to use, and everyone wants an account in it (now its Facebook having the same thing happening). While friend can communicate about all sort of things on it, there are also many hidden dangers. But many teenage users are not aware of the dangers. The girl in the video, Shannon Sullivan, only thought it was her friends reading the information on her page. So she threw on everything needed to find her in person, and she "didn't thing twice about it". She put on a fake age, even though she was underaged to use Myspace. Like many other teenagers, she had no idea about the online predators stalking people like her.

    

Because her mother had settings that allowed her to see the internet use on the computer, she found out about Shannon using Myspace. She grounded Shannon for two weeks, then had her place private setting on her page. This is very fortunate compared with other parents who has not the slightest idea about things like this. Teens put on all sorts of revealing pictures and personal information about themselves, and the online predators takes advantage of this. That's why parents have to monitor the use of social networking of their teens, to protect them from harm. I believe this is very important, and applies to all social networking sites, not just Myspace or Facebook. Teens should be careful about what they put on the internet, and what they do put on should be protected by private settings."

Just to show that not all students are as proficient in writing in my classroom, the intent to show learning is still there in other examples and show just as much learning.

"      In infotech today I watched a vodeo on how myspace can be "the" site for predators. in the video, it explained how a girl signed up for myspace when she was underage she signed up, and I was thinking, who's to say that people that are under the age of 10 are signing up. and if that happens it clearly means that they know a lot less about pravicy settings. So what I am trying to say is people signing up under age makes it so much easyer for predators to find people. 

         In my opinion i think that there should be a perant part of the sign up form so if there underage, so that way kids wont sneek on websites like myspace to sign up without permission"

Remember, it's only been a month for these students, and we're still in the process of setting up the eportfolios,and understanding critical thinking and analysis but they do understand that when they blog, it is an opinion and they explain their opinion to show their learning (critical thinking skills).

Both entries make me proud.  We're on our way to expanding our learning and developing learning skills.  ;)