There are several things that both teachers and students need to know:
- Teachers and students should register or be registered with the standard username from your school.
We recommend using first name and the initial of the last name, but it's more important to be consistent with what your school uses. - Teachers can fill in a form at Userplus to add multiple users and to assign roles to these users.
You might also decide to have students register themselves.
- You might want to use a G-mail account with the plus feature.
See more about this here. - Teachers should create a School Group for your school (and other Community Groups or Inquiry Groups as well.)
You will see the many reasons for this eventually.
- Teachers should make and update a text-only copy of usernames.
This will make it easier to add your students to groups. It should be a list like this: juana, susyk, joshp...
- When they register themselves, students should provide their first names.
There's a field that asks for First Name. Students must provide this unless the school has some rule against it. In which case we can accept the standard pseudonym that is used in the school for that student.
- When registering, teachers should provide both their First and Last names in the First Name box.
Please also send an email to Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim allisonpr@gmail.com | SEttenh@schools.nyc.gov to let us know how you are thinking of using Youth Voices.
- We ask each to user to complete a profile.
One important reason is that as soon as students enter things they are good at, interests, favorite books and authors, they find other students with shared interests. Most of us (teachers) have required 5-50 entries in each category in the profile (depending on the category!). This way, students connect in a meaningful way easily. They really like this feature and it teaches them about networking online and databases (since that's what makes it work!)
- All users and posts should have a school (or a super-school) linked to the work and their name.
- All users should list their school when they create their profiles/biographies.
- All users should join their school group from the Groups Directory.
- If a student or teacher is on Youth Voices as an individual (because his/her class or other members of his/her school aren't involved yet), then that user should join the "Students 2.0" or the "Teachers 2.0" super-schools.
- When students or teachers post on the site, they should choose their school group and any other appropriate groups, and make it public (unless part of a private group) before they post. (Note: Hold the Control key [PC] or the Apple key [Mac] to choose more than one group.
- We ask that students and teachers do NOT post photographs of themselves.
You will find a lesson plan for making avatars/icons in the "Youth Plans" group in the Groups Directory. If you would like to use it, feel free!
- We also ask that you are careful about using copyright free or Creative Commons photos in any work.
You can find a clear description of Creative Commons here.
- If students or teachers are already blogging somewhere, they can register with Youth Voices, then add a feed from their other blog using a link that appears on the home page.
- 1876 reads
