Cassandra Holman

EdTechBrainstorm.2007.10.25 is a discussion between Doug Symington and Arthus, a ninth grader from the United States.  They discussed topics that Arthus had discussed in a previous interview and the uses of technology in high school.  Doug stressed the importance of listening to the youth about technology and education.

Arthus said that he thought Twitter would be a great tool for education because teachers could send Tweets and parents could subscribe to it.  Also, the school could send out announcements through Twitter and the students could receive them over their cell phones. 

Arthus and Doug also s social networking.  Arthus said that he preferred Facebook over MySpace, saying that MySpace had a bad interface and wasn’t as private as Facebook.  On the topic of privacy Arthus said he wasn’t really nervous about stalkers, but more so about how his profile might affect his admission to college or getting a job in the future.  He also said that he thought that Facebook should have the profiles set to complete privacy as a default and users should go in  and change their settings if they want more things available to the public.  He thought one of the biggest problems was the fact that others can tag a picture of you and you can’t control it. 

A topic that I found surprising was that at Arthus’s high school the students do not have to sign and acceptable use policy, they just have it posted.  The main thing that students can’t do is use external email accounts, but the students have found ways around that.  Arthus argued that schools shouldn’t block certain tools because in the workforce and real world people will have to use these tools and then won’t fully understand them.  Instead, he thought that schools should teach how students to safely use the tools.