Prompt: How can I teach digital citizenship as it relates to digital communication? Being a citizen in the digital community comes with rights and responsibilities. Even though most of our students are spending hours everyday online for school, socializing, research, shopping, entertainment and more, we don’t always do a good job implicitly teaching them what it means to be a good digital citizen. Especially because there are huge safety issues as young people jump onto the world wide web, we as educators have to teach digital citizenship with the same priority and passion that we have for our content areas. At my school like many others, we have 4 core values to guide our Redwood community as far as citizenship which are: Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible, and Be Kind. Most kids at my school can recite these to you and we spend time at the start of the year explaining what that means and how it looks on our campus. As I researched digital citizenship, I could see the parallels between digital citizenship and my school’s core values. As I teach digital citizenship to my students, I want them to see the connections to our school wide values. In the Nine P’s of Digital Citizenship on Edutopia, Vicki Davis refers to Anne Collier, a cultural artist, who thinks we should drop the “digital” in digital citizenship. Being a citizen in the digital age means being able to navigate our online communities as well as our real world communities safely, respectfully, and responsibly. I think teaching digital citizenship at the same time we teach our school core values and revisiting it throughout the year makes sense. I think that digital citizenship should be taught in layers. The first layer should be a core of safety. What do kids need to know to safely be a part of the digital age? This is where Vicki Davis would educate students about passwords, personal information, private information, and personal photos that may reveal your location or other private information. Since we are focusing on digital communication, how can students safely communicate with other people in their community? Once kids know how to be safe online, they also need to know how to be respectful, which would include communicating respectfully and respecting other people’s ideas and asking permission and giving credit when using theri ideas. Vicki Davis stresses professionalism in communication and “netiquette”. The BBC has a great list of netiquette rules that I linked in. The third layer of digital citizenship would fall under responsibility. Students need to consider their digital footprint and reputation. Davis refers to it as a “personal brand”. How do students want to be perceived online? Are they being responsible and true to who they really are? Finally the last layer would be kindness. As we communicate and collaborate online, are we being kind to each other and considering other people’s feelings as we share ideas and work on projects together. One way I am making digital citizenship personal for my students is by having them help create our digital agreements. These are procedures and expectations we created during the first few weeks of school. It includes netiquette ideas like having your camera on & mic muted, being respectful & helpful in the chat, how to email teachers and other students, and how to share documents for projects. Another way I can make digital citizenship personal for my student is by having a weekly TRUTH of FICTION news articles. This is another idea from Vicki Davis. She finds stories about scams on Snopes and shares them with her kids. They have to be detectives and find out if the claims are true. Having my students educate older neighbors and grandparents about preventing identity theft and how to spot scams would also make the learning very personal.
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Today more than ever, world circumstances have created a time ripe for personalized learning. There are numerous learning platforms that have diversified the way people can learn things. Technology has become invasive. Most people have learned something on their own out of curiosity or necessity by searching up websites, you tube videos, or listening to a podcast. It makes sense that education would also embrace this powerful motivation in learning by making it self driven as much as possible. In my science classes students have a lot of choice when it comes to designing experiments and end products for projects. I give students objectives that their experiment has to meet but they are able to decide with their lab group what question they are going to answer and what method they will follow. It has meant that sometimes I had 9 different experiments happening in one class period (9 different lab groups) and it did border on chaos, but the engagement in the room was so high because kids had determined their own experiment. Of course this also meant things went wrong and teams had to rework their procedure and sometimes even change their question. They also observed and discovered things for themselves and had to ponder the why. This lead to research, another test, more thinking. It was just really satisfying to watch them create their own learning. Each group would also share their results with the class and then everybody could see the connections between the different experiments. In order to expand this type of learning and make it more effective I could increase the technology options in my class. Science content can be delievered in so many engaging ways. I think the Hyperdoc with a playlist that included several different ways to learn about the content and then options for application of the content. Students usually enjoy doing the labs in person, but there are also engaging simulations online that apply science concepts and allow students to easily manipulate the variables in an experiment. Videos are also a powerful learning tool in science. I have created lessons that I call Film Festivals. I select 3 or 4 videos that conatin similar content on a science standard we are learning. I ask them a question. One example was during our ecosystems unit. The questions was, "What does the balance of nature really mean? How would you describe it? " Students have choice about which videos they watch ( I pick different styles that all teach similar ideas) and I include 2 or 3 additional topics that are related but an extension of the science concept being learned. They takes notes while they watch and ususally answer the questions using a Claim, Evidence, Reasoning format. The challenge for me with personalized learning is the planning & feedback time. It does require more student conferencing, checkpoints. I could do this much more effcetively with google forms, screencasts, and probably Padlet or Flipgrid. The feedback does not have to be face to face live. One of the videos I watched about personalized learning created a great visual in my brain. The author said imagine that everything you want your students to know is like a giant map. You just have to figure out where they are on the map and help them move forward. The picture of that is in my mind and I think of it as the learner's journey. I'm a guide but it is their journey. As I began to read this article I recalled the saying, "How do you eat a frog?" Or was it an elephant? Either way, "One bite at a time!" I tried to move through the article quickly for a first read. I highlighted key words and looked up words quickly on my phone that I did not know. I was excited to see the reference to qualitative and quantitative (fun science words!) research (more fun science words- speaking my love language here folks!) so I annotated the text with some appropriate smileys. As I highlighted key ideas, I was asking myself the whole time, "What exactly is sense-making? What does this hyphenated word mean and why have I not heard of it before?" The new NGSS science standards we are using in science have this same idea, sensemaking, and it especially relates to the SEPs, Science and Engineering Practices. Does this word have the same meaning in both situations? My brain was focused on finding and answer to this question.
The sense-making metaphor Fig. 6.1 made things a bit clearer for me. Thank goodness for visuals! It also helped me to see that we can help people create the strategies that they will use to "make-sense" and bridge the gap. From a few other sources I looked at it seems that all the crazy piles of data being collected on everybody and everything cannot fully make sense with out considering this assumption stated in the article, "...the individual is situated at cultural / historical moments in time - space and that culture, history, and institutions defne much of the world in which the individual lives." As I read the sentence, "However, since much of human life is inherently unpredictable, much of human behavior involves creating new responses," I thought about the pandemic as a great example I would use if I was teaching this idea to my middle schoolers. I am a middle school science teacher. Middle schoolers have a lot of enthusiasm for science and exploring science questions. They are just so fun to teach! The days we do labs are so engaging for them and for me. They are so happy to be "scientists" and I enjoy watching them think things through, ask questions, plan, test, and then the joy as they observe the results. We are just such curious beings and middle schoolers will happily ask if they can try it again and test a new question. They also love to debate and argue, which becomes a very exciting part of our class learning process. My passion is most of all for the people I teach. I would like to work on establishing a model for our middle school that connects students in a meaningful way with a mentor teacher. Our school is so large (820 students) and I worry that students are slipping through the cracks and not really having their needs for belonging met. These mentors could be selected by a period of the day, like a homeroom model, or maybe by projects or clubs. Students need to know there is a teacher they can go to when school is overwhelming, when they just need some extra help, or they need some direction on how to get help, a person to lead them in reflecting on their learning and planning the next steps. There is a line in the song "Beautiful Anyway" by the band Judah and the Lion that says, "I'm here for a reason...I'm known and loved". That message is so powerful. Imagine if we could embed that message solidly in every middle schooler, along with a feeling of being a capable learner, a problem solver. They would just be unstoppable! And they would change the world! |
AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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