Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Tool #11

1. I love blogs now! I also love Big Labs. I will have students make an All About Me poster at the beginning of the year so I can start to know them and begin to build relationships. I will make one and share it first!

2. Having technology devices in my classroom will force me to think about how to incorporate them daily. The more I use them the more ideas I know I will come up with until it is just naturally part of my routine. I will also learn a lot from the kids. Creating something online that all of your classmates can see is more rewarding than a piece of paper that only your teacher sees.

3. I was equally surprised at how much I did and did not know. I am not as far behind as I thought but there is so much out there it is not possible to have seen and known it all. I am grateful to the district for providing us with so much online information. There are many resources and tools at my fingertips. I don't have to feel lost.

My school computer died. I am finishing this from my Mac at home. I wanted to take the self assessment on 21st Century skills from Atomic Learning but my computer would not allow it. When my Dell comes back to life I plan on doing that!

Tool #10

Wow I made it to 10! There are many things I want  kids to know about Digital Citizenship but I will start them off with the basics and see what they know then we can move on from there.
1. First will be the benefits and risks of online talk. Learning from others is one of my great passions but it is pointed out that kids need to use "internal traffic lights" as it says in commonsense media.com. That is the inner voice you hear that may be telling you something is not right. If you think something is not right don't wait around, get off that site and stop communication.
Second part of security is protecting your personal information. Kids need to be taught how to think critically before giving out personal information and never sharing passwords. It can expose them and their families to identity theft and their media devices to viruses.
Third is that kids have large ongoing digital lives. They have constant access to it and interact with large numbers thru social media. When you open up to that kind of exposure you need to be selective and careful about what you share because once it is out there it can be seen by anyone.

2. A resource that I plan to use and mentioned above is commonsensemedia.org. It has great resources for students, teachers and parents. I will also use EdTech.

3. I will teach the idea of digital citizenship by first having students in groups brainstorm what they think it means and then share out. Once we do that we can separate ideas T-chart style into correct and incorrect or rewrite what they originally shared. They may want to share some personal experiences with the class. We can compare it to being a good citizen in general and see if there are any similarities. Then we can look at some things on commonsensemedia.org

4. I will share commonsensemedia.org with parents on my syllabus, during open house and on my Twitter account. It has many resources for them and is in Spanish and English.