Thing #10

I have been playing with all the fun sites and have been trying to brainstorm lists of things I can do with my kids to incorporate some of these things. I am teaching summer school, and I think I will ask those students to help me with some ideas. They obviously were turned off or not served adequately during the school year, so I'm going to ask them what they think could be done to "punch up" history lessons with technology. I worry about being sure there is accurate content rather than just lots of flashy fun. One suggestion for a lesson I saw was for kids to be given 10 minutes to receive a text on their cellphones from someone off campus. I worry about liability: what if they contact someone inappropriate, what if parents resent paying for texting, what about the one or two kids who don't have phones-or kids make fun of them because they are not the latest technology. My school is a very have/have not campus. How do you control inappropriate content? Every site leads to many others. I guess at home kids have access to all this stuff, but I am somewhat uncomfortable sponsoring or assigning something that might initiate inappropriate contact. At school we have a firewall, but can I take that much class time from a TAKS tested class to take all the students to the lab the number of days it might take to get these kinds of things produced? Am I just too much of a worrier? I have liked some of the videos that were produced in a classroom and then posted on a web page for others to view. I can see that being a manageable projcet.