Course+Reflection+EDLD+5365

Assignment
Vidor ISDs current Acceptable Use Policy for technology addresses only limited use of technology. Because of the limited policy, I used the web policy from other schools as a template. There is also no Web Committee as exists in other school. There is a technology team, but it is unclear who is responsible for writing and rewriting the web policy.
 * ===[|Evaluate and update district web policy to include web 2.0 tools.]===
 * Self Assessment**

David Warlick (nd) writes. "A school or district web site should become in intergral part of what your organization does. It should be a reflection of the culture of your school or district, and this is accomplished when it is a community effort and the community is united with clear expectations and procedures" (Warlick, p. 3). Vidor ISD does not use many web 2.0 technologies and only recently allowed teachers to create a wikispace which would be linked to campus web page. The website is static in that there is posted information but no interactivity. Students do not post work online and classrooms, for the most part, do not have websites. It seems that the "culture" we've created is the antithesis of web 2.0.
 * Life as a Learner**

Regarding publishing student work, Vidor ISD does not have a specific policy. When I wanted to post work last year, I emailed the technology director who then met with the superintendent. It was decided that no pictures of the students nor student names could be posted. My students omitted names from their work, or created an alias. For some projects, the version with the name was publish at school and the unnamed version was published online.

These loose boundaries made creating the updated policy difficult. A policy should reflect the uses and needs of the campus and address future technology growth. For example, teachers are allowed to have a class wikispace linked to the school's website, and they are currently simply bullention boards; student interaction is not allowed per the most recent access use information from a faculty meeting. Should the students be allowed to interact with the site, we then face the need to establish guidelines for student publishing on that class website. Current technology trends for student learning show that this interaction is beneficial because of 21C learning such as collaboration (Richardson, 2004).

What is clear, is that the Web Publishing Policy should be consistent with the district Acceptable Use Policy and backed by the student Code of Conduct (Warlick, p. 1). Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum write, 'Because there are so many new issues that confront students on the Web and new concerns for educators, adopting a code of ethics to supplement acceptable use policies make sense" (Solomon and Schrum, 2007). My new document did support this suggestion.
 * Lifelong Learning**

Creating the document for this assignment left me feeling like I was struggling to break free of an old mold into one that better utilized technology. I believe the district needs to establish guidelines, but I also feel those guidelines should reflect current technology learning trends. In practice, I appreciate the opportunity to learn about web publishing policies from other schools and how they related to technology practices of those schools. I am hopeful that Vidor ISD will move towards more technology practices to meet the needs of learners.


 * References**

Richardson, W. (2004). Blogging RSS. //Multimedia and Internet in Schools.// Jan/Feb. 11.

Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0; new tools, new schools. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology Education. 146.

Warlick, D. (nd). District or school web publishing policy. Retrieved from []. 3.