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Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

Alfred Thompson's blog about teaching computer science at the K-12 level. Alfred was a high school computer science teacher for 8 years. He has also taught grades K-8 as a computer specialist. He has written several textbooks and project books for teaching Visual Basic in high school and middle school. Alfred is the K-12 Computer Science Academic Relations Manager for Microsoft and is trying to be the Microsoft Education Blogger.

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The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network

You really have to be careful about letting students use computer/network chat programs in school. I mean you hear it all the time. If you let them run chat programs they'll do all sorts of talking behind your back. Who knows what they'll be talking about. You can't have that sort of thing going on. No no no. One person at a time talking and most of the time that should be the teacher who of course knows everything. You've heard all that right? I have.

But as the Cool Cat Teacher Vicki Davis found out recently one real risk is that students might learn something. Something you want them to learn.

Take a look at this blog post. Read the post but the short version is that she set up a chat room for the students in her class to chat about what was going on in class. What happened was that the kids learned more. They asked each other questions and answered them. Students who seldom spoke up or participated in class discussions participated in the chat version of the discussion. And the teacher had a better idea of what the students did and did not understand.

Really does it get much better than that? I hardly think so. Oh it wasn't perfect and there are still issues to work out in the process but it looks pretty good so far.

Published Monday, September 10, 2007 7:30 AM by Alfred Thompson

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# Department of Learning Prevention @ Monday, September 10, 2007 8:05 PM

Earlier I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students

Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

# re: The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network @ Tuesday, September 11, 2007 11:06 PM

Some "fun".  I can see this site from my district network, but cannot your Channel 10 site, nor can I see Vicki Davis's site.  All are blocked by our district network.

I am wanting to use a chat room with my computer science class next week in order for us to do "accountable talk" but so far, those are all blocked too.  I have a call out to Network services for assistance, but have yet to hear from them.

I'm quite sick to death of being "baby sat" and when I get time will do some more blogging on that.

Kathleen Weaver

# re: The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network @ Wednesday, September 12, 2007 12:29 AM

You can't see Channel 10? I wonder why that site is blocked. And a teacher's blog? I wish I was surprised. One day my wife found that the district filter prevented her from getting to the American Library Association ethics page. Yeah we wouldn't want students learning about ethical behavior would we? :-)

The intentions are good but automated filtering can only go so far. What we really need to do is spend more energy teaching kids to be their own filters. Somehow they learn how to get around these other filters faster than the teachers do.

Alfred Thompson

# The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network @ Wednesday, September 12, 2007 9:03 PM

The Risks of Letting Students Use The Network A very interesting blog entry with some links to a teacher

Tonys Microsoft Access Blog

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