As part of 5th grade’s unit ‘Why Should I Care about the Environment?‘, students were asked to take action in some personal way. To model this behavior (as good teachers do), Jen has made a personal pledge to stop using paper coffee cups, and has started a blog chronicling this process: Cutting Coffee Cups Out of My Life.
She approached the Allegro staff with a suggestion to give a price incentive to encourage everyone to bring their own mugs rather than buying paper cups, and regular coffee buyers may have already noticed that the staff are currently doing data gathering, writing down every time someone brings their own mug.
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Image source (under a Creative Commons license):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fullgl/171813349/
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According to ISM’s mission and our school-wide student goals, our mandate is to develop “effective communicators” and “responsible, caring and ethical contributors“. The NETS technology standards also commit us to developing digital citizens who “practice legal and ethical behavior” in their “use of information and technology“.
This may all sound well and good, but what does it mean in practice?
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Image source (under a Creative Commons license):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadl/237122671/in/set-72157594279945875/ |
I’ve been writing a few things lately about the Internet as a tool for collaborating and connecting minds, both in terms of expanding educational opportunities and in the context of skills our students will need in the future. I’d like to explore another aspect of that for a moment…
I believe networked collaboration tools can serve a crucial role in other ways as well: as collaboration tools for social improvement. During the Long Now conference earlier this year, author Paul Hawken spoke of the emergence of what he calls ‘the largest movement in the world’: countless organizations working in decentralized unison to restore the environment and foster social justice.
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“We are failing our students when it comes to teaching them about the Internet. We either block things they will eventually get access to, at home or at an internet café, or we let them loose in the World Wide Wilderness without so much as a Swiss army knife. Wikipedia, Youtube and facebook are not the biggest problems.”
That was the blurb for my session discussing the dangers of setting students free on the Net without a little guidance. Here are some of the sites and resources that I used:
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