Category: general

My brain feels like this.

(Picture credit: BRAIN HUE Collection by Emilio Garcia, found on flickr)

Comic artist Lucy Knisley has created the comic digest version of Harry Potter books 1~5 – go here to look! Hilarious 🙂

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while, partly because every time I have a minute to think about posting I’m so overwhelmed with ideas/events/questions/recent readings/everyday drivel that I flounder around unable to pick something to write about, and end up abandoning the whole idea in favour of reading my Twitter stream…

Fortunately (or not, at this point I can’t quite decide) I have decided to take the advice of many a sagacious old proverb, and just make a start – thus the title for this blog post.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how to get abstract concepts such as ‘intranet’, ‘internet’, ‘world wide web’ and the many-faceted ‘digital citizenship’ across to my younger students. Library lessons are being used to have something of a blitz on digital citizenship this term, so I am exploring various aspects with every class from Year 2 through to Year 6, with a few extras thrown in with Year 8 for good measure. This is giving me a really interesting overview of things like:

• how many of our students have access to the internet at home,
• how restricted or otherwise that access is,
• how sophisticated their understanding of the internet is,
• whether they have any rules about what to share online, with whom, in what ways…

One thing I’ve been struggling with is how to help the youngest students understand the steps needed to save their work. All students from Year 3 up have a personal space on the school intranet where they can save their work, with the added bonus of it being accessible from outside the school via the online portal. Saving their work to their personal intranet page takes a few steps, but most students forget and revert to the My Documents one-click method; unfortunately this leads to widespread annihilation of projects as that folder is wiped when the student logs off.

I have found myself harking back to undergraduate education studies and Piaget – the concrete-operational stage. My Year 3s are just not developmentally equipped to hypothesise abstract constructs such as ‘intranet’, so I decided to try to make it real for them.

We have some great IT guys at my school and in a stunning piece of serendipity one of them has a son in Year 3. Earlier this year I talked to Matt about having an internal excursion to explore what the intranet is and how it works, and last week we took three separate classes on journeys from their classrooms past switch cabinets, wireless access hubs, big orange fibre optic cables, manholes beside the road, big pipes going over the top of roofs, all the way to the server room. I asked the boys to sketch each piece of equipment and I did the same, then took photos as well. Tomorrow we’ll be going back over our diagrams, perhaps adding arrows or colour, to check that we understand how the intranet works.

Then we will see if we can develop some ideas about how the internet works based on what we know about our intranet. We will look at some videos explaining the structure of the internet, particularly this one “The Internet Explained“. If time permits I’d love to have my students record some videos explaining how it all works, a bit like this Microsoft one.

*****

This post has been sitting in the draft folder for some time, so I will just add a photo and put it up. Sometimes it is necessary to stop dithering over imperfect expression of nebulous ideas and just put it out there.