Digital Literacies - What Does #StopKONY Mean For Our Students

You’ve probably heard about the viral campaign to stop Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The video has been watched approximately 40 million times since it’s release on Monday. If not it’s here:

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

This swept through our school today, all the pupils were talking about it, most had watched it. That’s 11-16 year olds watching a 30 minute documentary about an African war criminal in their own time. Quite unique!

I’m sure that getting celebrity tweeters such as Rihanna on board will have had a lot to do with the viral success of this with young people. It’s a fascinating insight into the power of social media, and celebrity to influence the hearts and minds of our young learners.

Something of a backlash has been taking place online today against the group behind the project, their accounts have been scrutinised and their methods criticised. 

The guardian has a nice summary, and also an interesting video with London schoolchildren.

Ethan Zuckerman has a long but well reasoned think piece about the whole affair.

As I left school, I’d not seen the video and wasn’t quite sure of the whole story. But the pupils were already talking about taking action. 

It’s taken me a couple of hours to digest many sides of the story, and argument. I’m still unsure as to whether we should encourage our students to show their voice for this cause, or caution them away from it.

I doubt our learners are spending so much time looking at this from all angles. This is a crucial digital literacy skill, and a golden opportunity for us all to engage with students about casting a skilled critical eye over everything they read, watch or hear.

One thing is clear, it’s a brave new connected world and we have significant challenges ahead of us to equip our students with the skills they’ll need to flourish in it. It’s also a world with the tools to do great good, our students can all have a louder voice than we ever imagined.

Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.

Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, getting it all wrong.

Please don’t listen to him. Speak your mind, share your ideas. And like I always tell my pupils, think before you post. Common sense not scare-mongering.

Which reminds me I have a policy to write for staff to include this. Does anyone have any good exemplars? I’d like to keep it simple as we did with our Learner’s AUP.

Source: BBC

Google Plus - Google’s next take on social networking

So Google have started releasing their new social product Google+ or Google Plus.  And it looks interesting if a little familiar to Twitter & Facebook.

Of particular interest is their attempt to allow you to segment your acquaintances and share certain information with certain people via the ‘circles’ feature:

This makes sense - I’m often a bit uncomfortable with my mix of friends, colleagues and my Mum on Facebook and it’s not easy to share stuff with only certain groups. One issue with Google’s approach would appear to be that you can only put people into one ‘circle’ - not terribly realistic, my acquaintances are actually a messy Venn Diagram of circles! Perhaps this is possible - time will tell.

What I am excited about is the opportunity to use it with staff at school.  We’ve been looking at a way of improving communication and sharing best practice.  As we use Google Apps for all of our electronic communication this might mesh in quite nicely.

So all I need now is an invite - can anyone help?!, and to cross fingers that it doesn’t go the way of Wave (I’m less excited this time!!)

Source: plus.google.com

Moving Home - to Tumblr

Well I like it over here, so I might stay a while!

Source: mrstucke.com