I have two outstanding partners for my major project, Awesome Ashley and Neat-o Nancy! Ashley was the first in our group to make public the course that we are going to be developing, and so I can really just say check out her blog post about what we are going to tackle since she did such a great job of laying it out!
Photo Credit: barnimages.com Flickr via Compfight cc
Like Ashley, I am quite excited about this project. I have always had an interest in course design and having so much freedom to create a framework for a course that interests us is engaging. I’ll be honest, anytime I have the option to choose ANYTHING related to teaching and learning, I go to the sciences. I really want to develop a locally developed astronomy course one day. Ashley, Nancy, and I have all been involved in increasing digital fluency in our school, with students and teachers. We want to continue this with creating a course around the Digital Citizenship Continuum created by none other than @courosa and @kbhildebrandt. It’s not quite science, but I recognize the need for this to be tied in with all courses. Every semester I have been moving my science classes more into what I would consider a blended model, and digital citizenship needs to be explicitly taught alongside this. It is every teacher’s responsibility, regardless of subject area, to include key literacies. There are helpful videos you can show your students, such as the one below about oversharing, but 3 minutes isn’t sufficient. Students need a more thorough exploration and that’s where a course like the one we are creating, based off of the Digital Citizenship Continuum, can hopefully come in.
There are a bunch of competencies included within the Continuum, and as Ashley notes, “The competencies have used the concepts of Ribble’s nine elements of digital citizenship and include three broad categories:
- Respect – digital etiquette, digital access and digital law
- Educate – digital communication, digital literacy, digital commerce
- Protect – digital rights and responsibilities, digital safety and security, digital health and wellness”
Nancy will be developing a module based on the respect category, Ashley the Protect category, and I will be taking the Educate category. Within that category, I am going to specifically be looking at the digital literacy topic.
Photo Credit: Ken Whytock Flickr via Compfight cc
Within the Continuum it highlights what students should understand and be able to do for each topic within a particular grade range. Since the three of us are high school teachers, we will be looking at the grades 10-12 range. For my particular topic of digital literacy, as an example, students are expected to understand “finding and evaluating information” and be able to, “use online tools for taking notes and organizing information”.
One of the goals we have in developing this course is to incorporate a wide variety of digital tools as you can’t really become a literate citizen without experiencing a wide variety of tools to help develop 21st century skills. I think we would really like to be able to incorporate the social and constructivist opportunities the internet provides in this course to make the experience as authentic as possible.
If you have any suggestions regarding particular activities you think students should have to complete as part of this course, I know we would love to hear about them. See, here I am using the social nature of the web to create something meaningful and that can be the best that it can possibly be. We would love to hear from you! On a more selfish note, if you have any specific digital literacy items you think must be included, let me know!
All feedback ‘preciated!
Live long and prosper
Great topic group! I am looking forward to what this online/blended course will exactly looks like. Looks like each of you have a topic picked out that all will fit nicely together.
Teaching in post secondary many of my students would benefit from having more digital citizenship! Who are we kidding… many younger and older adults could too.
As for activities that you could do…. great question….What about doing a pre and post course analysis assignment ie: what students would post online in the first 48 hours and the last 48 hours of the course. Than compare. Did anything change?
This was my first example that came to mind. Good luck and will be looking forward to seeing more on this.
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pre and post assessments are always a great way to see how much growth there was, and I think students would really be able to see some quick growth in this subject!
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I’d be really interested to see how your course turns out! There’s a teacher at my school who does something similar, if you’d like his name as a potential resource. He does it as a part of the grade 9 PAA rotation and it seems to get some good reviews from the students.
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Okay thanks for the tip Kelsie! I’ll let you know if I need some more extra resources to tap into, but good reviews from students means a lot since they can be tough critics!
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My apologies! Indeed, Joey and the girls were there just last week, and everyone was as happy as eve02#8&3r;even in Great Barrington, though- I must say this is a lot of snow…
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I love the breakdown of your modules! I think this is a great idea. Digital literacy is something being neglected in the classroom right now. Whenever I start teaching about bias in the media, I create two separate articles (usually on Tracy Latimer’s case). One of the opinion her father did a terrible thing by killing his daughter, and the other creating a lot of empathy for the family and focusing on the brutality of Tracy’s condition. Each article has a different title and picture of Robert Latimer to persuade the reader to a particular bias. I split the class into four groups, and each group will get a certain perspective. Then we have an entire class discussion, and kids have completely opposing viewpoints since they only read one bias. They can’t understand why their classmates disagree with them because they believe they read the same article. Eventually they figure it out, and we discuss how I basically manipulated them into believing what I wanted with the title, pictures, and information provided.
It’d be cool if there would be a way you could facilitate that electronically, as I find it extremely effective when introducing how important it is to evaluate information online and find alternative perspectives.
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thanks for the suggestion! I’ll see if I can incorporate something along those lines!
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Your collaborative course sounds amazing! I look forward to seeing your final product, acknowledging the fact that it will be so applicable to different situations and contexts within high schools. I would love to see the analysis of different websites – still in grade 12 I see students using solely Wikipedia for their research, and although it can be a good starting point, I don’t see a lot of people straying from it too regularly. A deepened knowledge of what quality exists out there and how to find it would be interesting to see developed within our students! Looking forward to your final project!
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I really like that idea – thanks Liz!
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I couldn’t agree more. I was only a “Zombie Killa.” I suppose I’d like to belive my survival and weapons prciicienofes would exceed that title. By the way let me be a contributer please.
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(Source) teaming up with Click Forensics in order to fight against click fraud may just prove to be a decision they will not regret. Advertisers will most likely appreciate their intention and, from that perspective, this partnership can be considered the second thing that Yahoo! has done right this week.
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I really like that you are highlighting the need for every teacher no matter their students age, subject they teach or space that they teach in to incorporate key literacies into their classroom. Goes with the age old “it takes a village” approach! Looking forward to seeing your project unfold.
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Love your course idea! This is such an important topic that needs to be incorporated into every classroom regardless of the age. Teaching in post secondary we have ran into many issues with students and appropriate posts to social media and have to incorporate a lot of “rules” surrounding this issue in our student handbook. I’m looking forward to following your progress.
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