We had a discussion about Facebook at our staff meeting last night. The principal pointed out that a couple of teachers in Manitoba had gotten into trouble (and one fired, if I understood correctly) because of comments on Facebook. One had inadvertently taken a comment that was supposed to be private and made it public, and one had his child repeat something he’d said about his supervisor which then eventually got back to the supervisor.

Fair? Probably not, but it does happen, and, as our principal pointed out, you need to be really careful. As teachers (and especially as Christian school teachers) we’re moral examples to the kids so both our professional and personal lives need to be in good order in case someone happens to notice how we live. Whether that seems fair or not, it’s reality and part of the job if you choose to become a teacher. You’ve got to live with it.

The other side of the equation, which I don’t think we really covered enough, is that social networking has a lot of power. I’ve noticed that through blogging, hanging out at Classroom 2.0 and “following people on Twitter, I’ve become an observer (and even someone with whom to share ideas) of some of the most creative classroom computer users in the world.

This kind of networking is only possible with Internet social networking. Social networking certainly has dangers when used frivolously (in the way many people use Facebook or MySpace) but can become a very powerful tool when used well.

I think the trick is not to stop the kids from using sites like Facebook, but to show them how. They need to understand not only the dangers, but also the potential. You have to be careful about letting out personal information, yet you can also make some incredible contacts.

It’s a balancing act. Without the risks, you don’t get the rewards.

I’ve been noticing a bit on Google Sites on Dogtrax’s blog (aka Kevin’s Meandering Mind) and I have to admit, he’s got me intrigued about this latest of cool Google tools.

Like Kevin suggests, using Google Sites is a dead simple way to create a simple website. It allows for collaboration between users with Google accounts and by doing that it acts as a pretty impressive wiki. If you use Google Sites within Google Apps all your Apps users can be automatically added as users of your Sites (which is pretty cool in a geeky kind of way).

Basically, I’m just looking for an excuse to use Google Sites and I think I have one next month lined up when I cover databases with my class. If it works, I’ll let you know.

I have noticed that, as a teacher, I really don’t like to stand in front of a class and lecture to/at my students. Over the years, I’ve noticed that other teachers do like to do that.

My approach forces me to move from lecturing to a more inquiry or discovery learning approach. Computers are an ideal tool to accomplish that. You can ask leading questions, give places or approaches for the kids to find the answers, and pretty soon your students will find out what they need to know without you having to stand up in the front and force them to take notes.

If you do like to lecture (and, let’s be honest, all of us do like to hear ourselves talk to at least a certain degree), computers aren’t that useful.

Could this be at least part of the reason why so many high school teachers are slow to adopt computers in their lessons?

Our Remembrance Day assembly was last Friday, and, as last year, it was a pretty slick affair. It had PowerPoint, spot lights fading in and fading out on various speakers, solemn music, a choir, bagpipes, and even a trumpet blowing The Last Post.

Yet for all the slickness of the affair, I was struck by how my students responded to it and how they responded to my class on Remembrance. I had only two pictures in class and a good handful of stories to illustrate why the Canadians fought in the Second World War and who they fought to help. Aside from the light illuminating the room, I used no technology at all.

I think they were a little jaded by the school’s official Remembrance ceremony. They’d been there and done that. Yet in class a simple story still gets the kids’ attention. No glitz, no glamor, just a few stories. It didn’t hurt that one of them was the story of my dad remembering the Canadian soldiers arriving in his village when he was five years old. The personal, and especially the immediately personal, will win out over glitz and glamor every time.

Technology in the class is a wonderful thing, and I’m completely hooked on it, but sometime I have to force myself to remember that less is really more.

I often ask myself why I bother to work on this blog. I have ideas on how technology can be put to use in the class, but does anybody really care?

Michele Martin summarized it neatly (along with help from Tom Peters and Seth Godin): Blogging helps you organize your thoughts in a succinct way and then gives you the opportunity to present those same thoughts to the world. If you get good at it some people may actually read what you have to say. If people aren’t yet reading you, then the exercise of blogging helps you to learn how to think intelligently and present your case clearly.

In a world where vacuous T.V., empty election slogans and promises, and mindless video games occupy much of the mental power of even some of the most intelligent people I know, it’s hard to come up with a better reason to blog.