I thought I'd take a bit of a break from my official statistical analysis of access to websites for two reasons:

1. It's high time we had some humour on this blog

2. It's July, it's summer and I need a break from trying to remember my university stats class

So here's an easy read look for your Tuesday! Don't worry, I've kept with the overall theme of students and their relationship with technology (my English teacher colleagues would be so proud of me!)

Just a little food for thought on your Tuesday!

Vanessa =)

Please note, this is part III of an ongoing discussion regarding access to specific websites in Education.  Click here and here to be brought up to speed.

The results are in for the corporate survey!  As a disclaimer, this survey only garnered approx. half the amount of respondents that the education survey did, so the sample size isn't quite what I'd like it to be for an accurate comparison. 

You can't really be surprised that 90% of people that I know are somehow tied to the education system, though. =)

For what it's worth, here's the initial outcome of the corporate access to websites poll that I conducted last week.  Again, look for a further explanation/analysis in future posts:

**please note: While at first glance it appears that 83% of respondents had full access to all the sites listed, this is, in fact, not true.   There were some variations in who had access to what -- the numbers just evened out at the end.  I'll discuss it in more detail in later posts :)

Are you surprised that the same amount of corporate employees and teachers have zero access to the websites listed? Any other initial reactions?  Feel free to comment below.

Vanessa :)

I have a secret.

I. Love. Historical. Documents.

OK, so maybe this doesn't come as much of a surprise to those who know that I was a Social Studies teacher, or to my former high school students who endured many a "story time" session read from the archives of the WWI/WWII documents.  I mean really, who doesn't get excited at getting a glimpse into the life of a person from many years ago, via their diary entries, letters to loved ones, or quotes in a newspaper? I love the look of aged, yellow newspaper and waterstained letters written in ink and the smell of 'olden days' memorabilia?

So...it's just me?

At any rate, today's Fresh Look Fridays post is focused on a fantastic, interactive website featuring historical documents.  Letters From the Trunk is, and I quote, "an exciting opportunity to learn about the men and women who settled in the Canadian West in the first half of the twentieth century."

Students can enter the train station from long ago, and explore the contents of various primary and secondary resources from people who made the journey to Western Canada.

I love this site for many reasons:

    1. It gives 'real life' context for events in history that are discussed in the classroom.

    2. It supports inquisitiveness, inquiry and exploration.

    3. It's a fantastic site for a small group of students to navigate through together on a SMART Board.  Think of the discussions that might come from some of their findings!

    4. It introduces students to the concept of primary and secondary documents.

    5. It's Canadian with an emphasis on Alberta.  For students in Alberta, this helps provide a small connection to the 3 immigrants' stories from 100 years ago.

    6. The items in this train station are completely varied -- posters, newspapers, photographs, diaries, maps, letters, audio clips and more.

This site definitely rates high on my list of websites to check out and introduce to your students!

Have a fantastic weekend everyone.  Go Riders! :)

Vanessa

In the interest of expanding our discussion of yesterday's results regarding open access to websites in education, I thought I'd see how "we" stack up against the corporate world.

Please encourage anyone and everyone you know that works within a non-education sector to complete the following form. Again, I tried to make this a less-than-7-second survey!  Look for the results and comparision between education and corporations in an upcoming blog post.

please note:  It might take awhile to load the form below -- please click the following link to see the original survey

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dENZX3RSRHg2bmxuN2tBQThSTlBEcnc6MQ

One of the most hotly debated topics regarding technology in education today is what the appropriate level of access for students? Is Facebook nothing more than a virtual bullying environment? Can Twitter facilitate more than just a discussion about what everyone had for breakfast today? Could Google docs be the avenue for which students could collaborate? What happens if this collaboration is for more sinister plots?  Should we give them iPhones?

It seems everyone has a strong opinion on this topic ranging from "open access for everyone and their dog" to "lock them down so tightly that you need permission to press the power button". I personally have quite a strong tendancy to lean towards the "open" camp, as outlined in a rant from quite a few months back.

For my purposes over the course of these next few weeks, I'm only interested in the level of access to websites for both students and teachers (because God forbid we should trust the adults in our buildings).

Enter Part I -- Analysis of Our Current Levels

Regardless of whether you're on Team Free-For-All or Team Lockdown, the reality is that the level of access at school is about as standardized as our preference for ice cream flavours. I'll let you decide the correlation between Bubble Gum, Cappuccino and Plain Vanilla with side of this debate. (Hmmm...I wonder if my preference for Tiger Tiger is symbolic...) 

I decided to turn to my fantastic PLN on Twitter to see what was available in their schools.  After much begging pleading requesting, my awesome tweeps responded to my 5-second poll!  The split between Elementary (K-6) and Secondary (7-12) was roughly 50/50 (I couldn't have planned this any better myself!)

Here are the results:

K-6 Schools

7-12 Schools

In the interest of preventing my blog posts from turning into novels, I'm going to leave it at that for today.  Some of the percentages surprised me, and there were some very interesting underlying trends.

But that's a blog post for another day.

What are your initial thoughts on these results? Anything surprise you? Leave your comments...

Vanessa :)

P.S. @kjamesa - if you're reading this (which I hope you are...since I sent you a Twitter message!), thank you, thank you, thank you for your forward thinking and open access to our websites back when I was a colleague! I can't believe that 8% of teachers from this survey have NO access to any of the websites listed! Obviously, you felt strongly enough to support the teachers in the division with increased access to valuable websites =)

Images taken from http://icons.mysitemyway.com/