Muddling through the blogosphere
A colleague just sent me the link to http://tinyurl.com/36brmw
I’m am completely for promoting iSafety and certainly support that part of the bill, but it sounds much like another iteration of DOPA, although this time, according to the article, “ed-tech advocates say the current legislation seems to make more sense and marks a more level-headed approach to internet safety.” But do we really need this bill?
In order to qualify for e-rates, my district, like most districts has for a long time had CIPA/COPA guidelines in place, and we are already in compliance – happily – with California AB 307:
This bill requires that school technology plans
include a component to educate pupils and teachers on the
appropriate and ethical use of information technology in
the classroom, Internet safety, the manner in which to
avoid committing plagiarism, the concept, purpose and
significance of a copyright, and the implications of
illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing. Districts would
not be required to change existing plans until their
current plan expires or is voluntarily replaced.
How much more legislation do we need?
Technorati Tags: DOPA
National Writing Project and Nat’l Council for Teachers of English hosted their annual conferences last week in New York City. What a treat! I managed to squeeze in some sightseeing coming and going from the hotel to the Crowne Plaza and the Javits Convention Center, and each evening, and all day on Sunday. And even managed a side trip to The Dalton School to visit with Monica Edinger’s 4th graders.
From each NWP and NCTE session, I gained resources and ideas for presenting Web 2.0 tools to teachers and students. Here’s a smattering:
I’m back home now, fighting a terrible head cold but excited to bring with me such great resources to share with my California colleagues, along with memories of the NYC experience.
Leni Donlan died earlier this week. Leni was my introduction to the Library of Congress. She was a source of inspiration, my mentor, and my friend. In looking through my email, I see that I have kept messages from Leni as recent as last spring and as distant as 1999, when I headed back to the Library of Congress for a week-long summer institute, a week I will never forget.
In my last blog entry, I talked about my Time of Remembrance project, a website that is this month’s focus of both my district’s website and the wonderful SECC’s BESTNet site. What I neglected to mention was that during my first year in the Elk Grove School District, the year I met Marielle Tsukamoto, I also applied and was accepted to the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project. Leni was one of the project directors. The end product of my week at the LOC was the online lesson Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself. Leni was my “thinking partner” and generously gave of her time to share the importance of students having access to primary sources in order to construct their own understandings of history and how it relates to them.
Last spring, Leni again became a thinking partner as I began to draft a NEH (National Endowment for History) RFP for a grant modeled after the Time of Remembrance project. This time I wanted to focus on the women of World War II. Leni helped me, from start to finish, with the Rosie the Riveter: United and Divided on the Home Front proposal. We were not funded, but I never regretted a moment spent on the effort because it was such a privilege to be co-designing and writing with Leni.
I am too sad about her passing right now to go back and read through her emails. But I will keep them, eventually revisit them, and treasure them for a long time to come. How lucky I was to have known and worked with Leni Donlan.
Technorati Tags: Leni_Donlan, Library_of_Congress, LOC, American_Memory_Project, TOR, Time_of_Remembrance