This week, mom and I visited Point England School in Auckland. It’s in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Auckland. Despite that, they get MORE funding from the government for their school. The schools in the higher income areas get less.
This school has a lot of technology. Students (years 6-8) have netbooks and there are several desk-top computers in each classroom. Kids as young as kindergardeners are blogging! The school emphasizes the importance of the kids having an “authentic audience” for their work…not just their teachers and peers, but all over the world.
Student working on her netbook
I was very curious about online safety and privacy with these kids. It was explained to me that the community the school is located in is mostly made up of Pacific Islanders and Maori families. Public sharing and transparency are a huge part of their culture. When the school getting permission to share students’ information (not over identifying, just first names) the parents’ attitudes were more like “why WOULDN’T you share their work with the world?”
All the student blogs are owned by the school and the kids are co-authors on them. There is one password for the blog account. So, in theory, every kid COULD edit another kid’s blog. Of course, that would cause concern. But in the time they have been doing blogging with the students, they’ve had ONE incident of this happening. Then they dealt with it like “you know you shouldn’t go into another student’s desk or book bag without their permission. Why would you do this?” They saw this incident as a teaching moment, not just a time to panic and scrap the whole thing.
Students working with their netbooks
Our schools could learn a lot from this school. Unfortunately, there are so many restrictions from “high-up” that limit US schools from giving students the ability to share their work with the world. There’s still lots of discussion on this matter.
