Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Jason Marconi's thoughts on Russell Street School Blog

    My initial reaction to the Russell Street School Blog was that of pure awe. At first, the businessman in me thought this had to be a private for profit school using their blog as a natural advertisement. Once that feeling dissipated and I clicked deeper into their school community I was inspired by the full school participation. After checking out the homepage, I decided to visit room 9. When I entered room 9 I felt like I was being greeted by an eager teacher excited to show me all the student's work and school activities. From the doodle for Google to parent assignments to help their children, there was a strong sense of community and sharing.  I visited with Alex at his blogging home page. I would not be very honest if I did not clarify, I spent a good ten minutes testing the limitations of his virtual pet's interaction. What an incredible feature to keep younger children engaged and excited to visit their own blog. Alex wrote about the excitement that he felt when he and his family went to see the new Batman movie. The teacher shared his enthusiasm and generated positive and constructive criticism in his comments section.  I continued my  virtual tour of this school and came across a class project involving cereal. I am not too proud to admit I will be using their project idea in my marketing class. For those of you who did not read about it, here is a little background. The students created their own cereal made of yogurt covered raisins, granola and honey. They then had to package and market the cereal. There were three different rooms involved in the entire process. The cereal was being sold at $6 dollars a box. I can only imagine how much fun that must be for the students and teachers.

   A community blog like that must have taken a committed staff and faculty effort. I would love to talk with those involved in the planning process and learn about the challenges and barriers they overcame to produce such a well-developed community blog. From the readings, Melanie Shoffner mentioned how important preparation is for the successful implementation of just about any technology in the class. Asking the "Why?" before adoption. It would seem Russell Street must have had a significant planning period with its teachers before tackling such a project, and did a great job answering the “why” for blogging implementation.  

9 comments:

  1. Jason, in New Zealand, schools are assigned a decile rating based upon the socio-economic status of the students that it serves or the community that it is located in. A one decile school is in a very wealthy area, while a 10 decile school is in a very poor area. You may be interested to know that Russell Street is a decile nine school, meaning it is in the highest 90% wealth in terms of school locations.

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    1. I had that question, so thank you for answering that! I'm impressed with the student participation and am interested in finding out how many parents use this blog, and how frequently it is accessed. I guess even if parents don't access it, allowing students to showcase their work and to be proud of something they create can be worth every effort of creating and maintaining the blog.

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    2. Well that is very fortunate for those students at Russell Street. For some reason my first thought when I was reading the decile breakdown was the "rich get richer".

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    3. Actually, funding is based on the school's decile level. So the lower your decile rating, the more funding you get from the national government. So Russell Street School would be getting the second lowest level of per student funding from the national government.

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    4. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10892319

      I'm starting to grasp a little bit more about the decile levels after reading that article. I looked at it from an ignorant standpoint assuming a decile one rating was basically an inner city American type institution, but as i'm learning now the system is more complicated than that and actually fluctuates in accordance to their census. For our purposes in this class I would be interested to see if there was a increase or decrease in blogging usage or adoption between the differnt decile levels and not only blogging but basic technological integration as well. Two alternative viewpoints in the article that really caught my attention:

      "The decile system is a very crude measurement tool and anyway, schools should not be able to seek donations from parents at all," he says. "All schools in the country should be fully funded. At one time, it didn't matter which school you went to in New Zealand because they were pretty much equal."

      Educational sociologist Professor Martin Thrupp, from the University of Waikato, defends the system, arguing that it is inescapable that socio-economic issues affect school performance.

      "Deciles often just confirm what parents already know about the social geography of their area," he explains. "The resulting funding props up and compensates the lower decile schools, which is really important and what it is meant to do.

      "If I sent them to a higher decile school further away, I would probably also be required to do a lot more to raise cash for the school and pay higher donations because of less government funding"

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    5. Jason, it is an interesting system. Essentially, the government looks at the social and economic factors of the in-take community for each school and makes a determination about how much resources the community has to offer the school. The more resources the community has, the less the national government provides. The fewer resources the community has, the more the government provides. Given that one of the few things we can say about student performance is that it correlates quite well with socio-economic status, a system of funding that attempts to address that by providing lower socio-economic students more funding is quite progressive.

      On one of your points, "For our purposes in this class I would be interested to see if there was a increase or decrease in blogging usage or adoption between the differnt decile levels and not only blogging but basic technological integration as well." I would suggest that it would probably decrease. While the funding for the school would increase if the decile rating was lower, the ability of the parents and the community to support those activities would likely decrease. Further, the ability to provide access in the home would be severely decreased. Essentially, it would raise digital divide issues. Now these things are all overcomeable, but there are likely bigger fish to fry.

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  2. This is a great conversation. My husband worked in an AZ Title 1 school last year, which means that the government gives more aid and supplies because the students fall into a lower socioeconomic category and the students don't perform as well on standardized tests. While most of his students did have cell phones, they usually worked to pay for them and students didn't have computers or internet in their homes. So, being able to have technology access at school was one of the only ways students could get online on a computer and do any kind of academic research or schoolwork. I really like what the Russell Street School has done, but I wonder if they were able to pull it off because their school is a decile 9 indicating higher access for students at home - despite less funding from the government?

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    1. That is a good point about their ability to maintain an at home blog presence given their higher community rating. I did read the lower decile levels don't necessarily mean you live in a poverty zone, so I think (but I really am just learning about all this in a matter of the last few days ha) it might be a mix of accessibility, but I'm sure there is still some divide. One town I read about Auckland was a lower decile the last census but have since seen home prices rise and the community grow which they are predicting will increase their decile rating, which may in return bring a more connected student base. Really interesting stuff.

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    2. Jason, some neighbourhoods in Auckland would be low decile. There are some parts in the south of the city that are quite poverty ridden. Think about New York as an example, some sections of the city are quite wealthy and other parts quite poor. To establish a system of funding for the city based on the socio-economic status of those living in the upper west side wouldn't really be fair to the people living in certain portions of the Bronx. Auckland, like most cities, is divided into multiple sectors for the purposes of the census (or census tracts), which allows the Ministry to take into account some of their variances within the city for school funding purposes.

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