Have you seen the spedubloggers?

In my google searches: "special ed teacher + blog" and "specialneeds + blog," I'm not finding as many results as I expected for special education teacher blogs. It seems there aren't many special education teachers in classroom 2.0 either. Where are they? Where are they hiding? Are they afraid to discuss what's going in their classrooms via blogging? Are they turned off by the technology? Do they have access to the technology? Being a special education teacher isn't an easy job, I know, but you can often find comfort connecting & brainstorming with other teachers. Have you seen the spedubloggers?

(Cross posted from My Edublogger Page)

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Comment by Kate Fanelli on November 9, 2008 at 8:13pm: Hello, I'm a sped teacher, too. I teach in a day treatment center for emotionally impaired kids. We serve 23 districts in southeast Michigan. I don't blog, but I subscribe to blogs that I read pretty religiously. And I read lots of stuff on this Ning. I don't read sped stuff, though. It's usually general stuff that I use to inform my classroom.

We have a pretty good tech system in our school. I have 6 up to date Macs in my room, plus my own laptop. The big problem with social tools for us is confidentiality and fear of inappropriate uses. I'd be willing to give the kids a chance to prove that they could use social tools responsibly in terms of content and language if I didn't have to worry about one infraction leading to a huge investigation about how I could ever allow and provide an opportunity for kids to talk to each other without direct and constant supervision of staff. I also can picture worst case scenarios where they don't just use bad language or spread a fairly harmless rumor, but where they use it to organize something more malicious.

But confidentiality is a huge issue. Our kids identities as special ed students are legally protected. So, anything where they can share their projects and ideas with the world would be highly limited. Having any combination of names, last names, name of our school, and image is bad. Even if students didn't expose themselves as students as our school, if things were widely posted, there's not much stopping another student from outing someone.

It's sad. I do use technology based projects in my room, but no product can be shared (even at professional development type stuff). Pictures and projects can't be sent home because they may have pictures of other kids in them, or mentions of other kids in them, or may include some sort of personal content that students may not want associated with themselves down the road or in certain contexts.

But for us, it's just the way things are right now. Oh, and then there's the issue that lots of blog sites and other Web 2.0 pages are blocked by our district filter...