My school's social networking policy

I've shared this with a few people and thought I'd share it more widely. Two years ago my school came up with a social networking policy for faculty and staff. This gives the adults in our school clear guidance about what is expected of them. If you use it, please credit it back to The Hewitt School. We fully expect this policy to evolve as our online lives evolve. This just happens to be where it is right now. If you're looking for other policies Alex Ragone recently shared this link, which has quite a lot on it. We've been thinking about this more and more as our school just launched it's official Facebook fan page.

Policy on Social Networking

Faculty and staff members are only to interact online with students in school-sponsored "spaces." Interactions on CourseWeb, Hewitt e-mail, and other Hewitt-sponsored online spaces are appropriate, while interactions via commercial sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc, are not. If a faculty or staff member is contacted by a student via non-Hewitt channels, the corresponding division head should be notified. 

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

Prezi Desktop 3 is out

via blog.prezi.com

As some of you know I use Prezi often as a digital presentation tool. I enjoy the aesthetics and the transitions between ideas. I also enjoy being able to navigate in a non-linear way or a linear way. If you haven't tried it, it's worth a look. Here's some video highlights of the most recent version. Much of it is free for educators, but I have a paid account for access to the desktop version (which works without an Internet connection and doesn't require the web).

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

Recruiting and retaining male teachers

A colleague at another school posted a message today about the struggles they are having recruiting male teachers in their school. I'm quite sure there are unlimited numbers of possibilities of why schools get into a gender equity challenge. In responding to her I passed on a helpful resource from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, "Recruiting Male Teachers." I found it helpful, and hope you do, too.

If you've got any other strategies or resources for me to share, please do let me know.

Posted via email from arvind's posterous

"Data in, Brilliance Out" - graphing how it should be

via tableausoftware.com

I've been playing with Tableau's graphing program and it really takes data analysis + elegance to the next level. I'd love to use this with students and teachers, but need to do some more playing myself.

It seems incredibly powerful, and the colors/design, well, they're just plain fantastic. Microsoft will have to take heed, because what's coming out of smaller groups like Tableau will give Excel a run for it's money. That being said, if you're doing serious number crunching/financial analysis, this isn't the tool for you. But if you need to present data in a visually compelling way, this is a winner.

Posted via web from arvind's posterous