This morning I went to Rocanville School to meet my cooperating teacher that I will be working with in the fall. It was a good morning and I am very excited to intern there, but one thing concerns me- ALL social media is blocked within the school. That means no Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, FB, in my classes. This class had gotten me so excited about trying out new technology in the classroom and now that I can’t do that, I am a little sad! When I asked about blogs, I learned that the server can rarely support that many students logging in all at once so it might not be the best idea. I was looking forward to incorporating blogging into my classroom!
My teacher could tell that I was a little disappointed, so she mentioned that we might be able to talk to the school tech people and see what we can do. This at least gives me some hope!
It sounds like this fall I may have to do some convincing as to why these tools should be made accessible to everyone in the school!
Miss Young's Blog 
I can understand your disappointment! Last year in fall, I did community work in a school, and I was as disappointed as you are today to know that they didn’t allow students to use computers. Even when I asked for permission to show students videos on my personal ipad I was refused 😦
It was really sad to see that kids were enthusiastic to learn but they were not getting proper guidance to set their foot into this amazing world of technology. Hope you are able to convince the school staff to expose children to technology and see how fun learning can be for them1
Best of luck!
Hi Bretten! So sorry to hear that this is the case for your internship! I hope that you will be able to show your cooperating teacher and school the benefits of incorporating technology into the classroom as well as the benefits technology can provide us as teachers. One thing too that I think we all need to remember and I think you already have is that not all schools will have the resources and capabilities to suit the activities that we are wanting to do and so we need to be satisfied with finding other ways to do these things. Thanks for sharing your disappointment with us because it is good to see both the good things we will encounter and the frustrating!
Hey! I’m sorry to hear about the disappointing news, but I wonder if I could offer a suggestion that may help to up your spirits…
Would you be able to propose some ideas with mobile learning as discussed with Liz Kolb in our Mobile Learning session? Perhaps students could access some social media (Twitter) as well as maybe some of the other sites and resources discussed on their phones or iPods. Maybe if you proposed this to the co-operating teacher, she could further discuss it with the school administration. This would prevent any type of changes needed on the tech level (although that would be a good thing to change for other teachers too, it’s just sort of boat-rocking).
I hope you are able to come to some sort of solution so that you can incorporate your new learnings! Keep us all updated!
Renee I also think that this is a great idea, you could even use polltogo or something of that sort to incorporate technology into the classroom!