As I prepare to leave my position at Berlin Brandenburg International School, I’ve had the unique opportunity to mentor my replacement, Corinne Eden, as she steps into the role of IT Learning Specialist. This has been both a great chance for her get to know key people in the organization and become familiar with some of the “touch-points” that will likely be the focus of her job starting out in August. Upon reflection on the work we’ve done this year and the topics that are currently “trending” in meetings and hallway discussion, here’s a list of what I see to be the top five opporunities for IT integration at BBIS.
Tin Can Phone - Knot by Jeff Werner on Flickr!
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5. Communication: This year a lot of development time and PD was dedicated to creating a learning portal for the BBIS community. After several delays (some not in our control), I believe we have a functional system that can be used to communicate and consolidate our electronic resources. Built using Sharepoint service, it is NOT an intuitive user interface, but class pages do exist and it’s quite easy to add simple announcements, share files, and keep a calendar. The work ahead includes getting the parents onto the portal and I believe this is best accomplished by giving them compelling reasons to visit, such as sharing some content there like updates, photos, videos to give them a glimpse into the day-to-day activites going on in the school. At Upper-primary through High School, it makes a lot of sense to develop the class pages into an online learning hub where electronic files can be exchanged and communication can take place outside of class. Some teachers will also be ready to learn more advanced skills like “embedding” content from Web 2.0 services like Flickr! and Vimeo.
A major stumbling block for us in embracing online services are concerns over privacy. We, as not doubt many other International schools, have children of diplomats and this fact combined with the hyper-sensitive “datenschutz” culture we live in has provided a huge hurdle for a lot of our teachers to doing anything at all online. They are naturally skeptical (maybe rightly so to some degree) of any online service. There is a lot of hard work to do here in really getting people to figure out the line between reasonable protection and paranoia. Online privacy is not a black and white issue and we must do everything we can as a school to both protect the privacy of our students while at the same time teaching them how to take reasonable precautions in their online lives. This is best done, in my opinion, by getting them online so that they can experience online communication and publishing. They will make mistakes, but it’s better for them to make mistakes when we can help correct them and to learn from them.
One teacher in the German department experimented with using Facebook to help students digest a major literary work: Goethe’s Werther. I expect to see the use of social networks expand here next year. This will require us to reexamine our web filtering practices as well since we currently block Facebook. As a school, we need to pay close attention to managing our own presence on these networks as they can be a major marketing tool. As Jeff Utecht said way back in 2008 when I saw him at EARCOS, “if you don’t take control of your social presence, someone else will!“. Those words have stuck with me and have been oft repeated. Facebook in Education has released a nice resource for teachers looking to use this tool with their students while maintaining their separate, private sphere on the service.
By getting our kids online, publishing, and soliciting comments, as our Grade 3 students have done recently with their Migrations Unit of Inquiry project on Voicethread, we can reach a global audience and gain perspective. Collaborative projects with global reach are easy from a technology perspective and I see these forms of communication expanding. Teachers will need the most support in arranging and carrying out a project but we can stand on the shoulders of giants here by using resources like those from the Flat Classroom project and the ePals network.
Have you been through this? What advice can you offer about shifting the communication?
Is communication in your list of “to dos” for next year?
