Thing 18: Digital Tattoo & Digital Citizenship

     Digital Citizenship has been a big interest of mine and of our school for some time. It is always a work in progress and something on which we can't let up. Our district has adopted the Common Sense Digital Literacy and Citizenship Classroom Curriculum as a guideline for our teachers and students. I work with several teachers on a variety of  lessons for the different age groups. So far, we are pretty pleased with what they offer. And, it is a lot!
     I started this lesson by watching Common Sense Media: Digital Footprint Intro Vimeo and then by searching for myself using the suggested search engines. Nothing horrible appeared. I am thinking that is a good thing.  ;-) I decided to have eighth graders Google themselves next week in a lesson we are doing on Google tips, etc.  I read the articles:

• Skills We Can’t Teach: Facilitating Authentic Experiences with Digital Citizenship
• Digital Footprints — How big and do they stink? 
• Is your school’s “digital citizenship” practice a pass or fail?
• It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens.

These articles and blog posts were good and reaffirmed what I believe and try to practice. I decided I needed to share the one called "Skills We Can't Teach" (and, maybe a couple others, too) with my superintendent, who is a huge Digital Citizenship promoter because he believes in teaching social media, not blocking it.   
     I went through the Digital Citizenship Education curriculum that was linked and found a lot of useful information, including the video clip below and the fact that BrainPop and BrainPop Jr. both have a lot of great resources related to this topic.  

Living in the Digital World video clip

(from Cable Impacts, part of Cable in the Classroom, looked good for use with students in grades 4 -6)

      I am going to start using the Digital Passport from Common Sense with my fourth grade students.  I have set up a group and added most of the names. I will begin after break, I hope.
      As I read through the variety of material you provided, I found another great edtech information source to follow on Twitter.  I found several other hashtags to watch: #EdTech, #satchat, #pypchat, #satchatoc, #teacherwellbeingchat. 

              Polly, I am wondering one thing that I might have missed

              in a lesson last year. Is there a way to save hashtags that

              interest you so that when you want to check in you don't

              have to try to remember them?  

    Last year, when we learned about Pinterest and ScoopIt, I set up a board in Pinterest and made a topic in ScoopIt on Digital Citizenship.  Both of which I use all the time to save materials and use items in my instruction.  You can see the resources I have collected by clicking the links below:

• ScoopIt topic:  Digital citizenship for a K-12 School
• Pinterest Board: Education/Digital Citizenship

     I have an image that has been posted and pinned all over, but I really like it for our students. I have printed it and used it. It is brief and to the point. There are a couple of versions of it, but I am particular about mixing upper and lower case and this one is less messy that way.  :)

      Last, Edutopia has a nice collection of resources. I don't think you had that as part of the lesson.  

Digital Citizenship: Resource Roundup | Edutopia

     This was fun and interesting to read about a topic I really enjoy. I gathered several resources I hadn't stumbled up on and learned about some great things that I have right at my fingertips. I am excited to try some new lessons and to use Digital Passport.  I linked so many articles and resources here so that they are in one quick spot when I want to re-read them.  Thanks, Polly - this is great stuff!!  :)

     4/18/14 I found a new list of resources "Scooped" this morning:

21st Century Educational Technology and Learning: Part One: Digital Citizenship Education...Over 20 Essential Resources 

Track 2 Thing 17 Coding

     This is one of the first lessons that has been pretty difficult for me. One thing was finding the quiet time I needed to get something accomplished was very tricky; and, the second thing  was that the concepts were a bit puzzling. I certainly could tell characters to follow directions and I could follow directions, but the problems were what to do with what I did. 
     Anyway, here is what I did: 
     I started by watching the videos on the Cool Tools site. I watched and completed "An Hour of Code".    I worked with Blockly.  At code.org I completed "One Hour of Code" and got my certificate (see below).

     My hope is to continue with more of this during the summer and to get some kids to try this, too.  After code.org, I moved on to Khan Academy and began their "hour". I onlu got through the first two parts and will get back to that at a later point. I got these items accomplished during some staff development time where my administration was kind enough to let me work on this.  :) Because I wanted to see several different organizations offerings, I moved on to CodeAcademy and did the "Animate Your Name" lesson. That was fun and I got it done. I still have not figured out what I can do with the code I used. It doesn't seem to embed here or at my library's Weebly site. But, I will provide the link so you can see Melinda in all its colorful glory.  :)

Melinda

 By doing this, I could better understand the importance of commands and the order they are used.  I also realize that punctuation for coding is also important.  
     Next, I downloaded several apps for my iPad: Kodable, Hopscotch and Daisy the Dino. My next mission was to  find some apps for my Nexus 7s and let the 5th and 6th graders play around with them. Although, I have found many fun and educational apps for the iPads, I have learned there are not nearly so many for androids. I did find a great article at Common Sense, which I am posting.

Cool Coding Apps and Websites for Kids

     From this article, I decided to download Light-bot, the free version (an hour of code) and then purchase the Light-bot Programming and the Light-bot Coding Puzzles.  Next week I plan to set the Nexus 7s out for the kids to try.  Here is the review from Apps Playground, a British site:

Light-bot is the latest app teaching kids to code by Stuart Dredge.

     While I was searching for apps for androids, I found other articles about apps that I liked:

Five iPad apps trying to teach programming skills to kids

How and Why to Teach Your Kids to Code

Teach Kids how to Code, Make Apps and 3-D Models With These Tools

Teach kids programming A collection of resources

Tynker is the latest iPad app aiming to teach kids to code

     I also discovered a couple more great tweeters to follow. That was a big plus!  :) 

     What I learned from all of this is that we need to be teaching coding to our kids. At first, I thought it would be for older students, but now I realize that it is another item that works with young students. For our school 4th-6th graders might be a good group to target.  I hope it is something we will see more of soon.  I shared some coding articles with others and hope to share a few more.  All in all, this lesson turned out to be very informative, interesting, and one that I (we) will need to re-visit here at Colton-Pierrepont.  Thanks!