Thing 11: Digital Tattoo and Digital Citizenship

As I look at tools, resources, and information on the topic of Digital Citizenship, my biggest takeaway in developing my own strategy is that I was to instruct from the perspective of empowering students rather than a perspective of fear.  I found many of the lessons focused on "staying safe", presenting the assumption that being online is dangerous.  While it is important for us to teach students where they may encounter dangers, I think we will have a more effective impact if we lead from a more proactive approach, focusing on opportunities to engage in positive and empathetic behaviors online as they develop as digital citizens, just as they develop as citizens in the larger sense. 
I appreciated the definition of Digital Citizenship presented by Common Sense media, "empowering your students with skills to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly online, allowing them to connect and collaborate in meaningful ways" ("How to Teach Digital Citizenship Through Blogging").  In an effort to follow this mindset, our Director of Instructional Technology and I developed and delivered a carousel of learning activities on Digital Citizenship for our 7th grade students.  We framed their sessions with Essential Questions framed within these three categories from Common Sense media: Digital Footprint, Relationships and Communication, and Cyberbullying.  Students rotated through 3 stations, all designed with a different content and instructional focus.  Our session on cyberbullying was presented through scenario cards and small group discussion and role playing. The session on developing your digital footprint was an individual exploration of online tools accessed through this Google Site.  Finally, the session on Relationships and Communication was a large group presentation facilitated by our safety officer. 
Our reflection time after these sessions was critical, as students engaged in these activities with a mix of seriousness and mischief.  We were able to provide opportunity for a group reflection, focused on their role in creating their community online, and then challenging them to each make individual commitments to grow in at least one specific area.  We collected their commitment, or "Promise" cards, and plan to give these back to them in 6-9 months for a follow up on how they are doing towards this goal.
One thing that we felt strongly about after running these sessions was the challenge of it being a stand alone, one time activity.  We are hoping to build from this place towards and ongoing, monthly series of learning experiences that can be embedded in a more authentic way. 

Thing 8: Digital Curation

I have been really inspired by the AASL Standards (Library) to incorporate curation intentionally into my instructional practices (Shared Foundation IV: Curate).  Curation is something that I have always done as part of my library resource sharing, but building it into student learning strategies to Empower them as learners is something new for me (ISTE standard I. Empowered Learner).  This year I incorporated curation into my Research Seminar class as one of their learning objectives.  Students had to think critically as digital citizens to evaluate web sources and collaboratively curate a list (ISTE Standard II. Digital Citizen). They are required to consider relevance and reliability of source content, and defend the usefulness of these sources to our intended purpose.
Research Seminar has a blended learning structure, which I organize around student generated questions about the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.  As they gathered sources, students contributed to shared collections, such as this one on "Clean Water", within our school libraries Destiny Collection.  This was both a new learning activity and new tool, and a great learning process for both myself and the students.  Some things worked well and others need to be adjusted after reflection. 
In looking at additional tools available, I explored Wakelet, which I really liked.  This digital curation tool allows you to easily gather all different types of sources and displays them in a visually appealing format.  There are so many applications for these curation tools within the library curriculum, and resource sharing for faculty.  I may utilize this tool with Research Seminar students next year, rather than Destiny Collections, because of the visual appeal and ease of access.  It generates a link to invite collaborators, which I could share through Google Classroom, streamlining that process for collaborative curation.  This would benefit students who struggled this year with the sign in process for Destiny Collections.  The visual format of Wakelet also lends itself to embedding content into a website, so I could share these resources beyond the context of the classroom.  Below you can see what that format looks like, which would be very functional, not only for student access to resources, but also sharing instructional tools and professional articles with teachers and faculty.  In the past I have created Smore Newsletters to share with colleagues, but I may try Wakelet as an alternative, because I can continue to curate topics and consistently share those resources.

Thing 6: Digital Storytelling

While I do a lot of media creation and digital storytelling with students, this is an ever changing and growing arena of technology tools, so I always welcome an opportunity to explore new options and dig deeper into the creation capacity of familiar tools.  For this assignment I focused on the solutions for student creation being rolled out in Adobe Spark, and creating within Powtoons. 
This week I rolled out a project in a Spanish 7 class in which students were asked to create Travel Videos to entice tourists to various Spanish speaking countries using the five senses.  The teacher had used Adobe Spark in the past, but at that time the regulations within the program meant she had to allow students access to her account for them to create, because most of the 7th graders were still 12 years old.  Recently Adobe Spark created an Education option, allowing schools to connect their student Google accounts, which solves that student access challenge.  I worked with my tech department to make this connection possible and the rollout to students went very smoothly.  They are in the creation phase now, and will be heavily relying on the resources I provide through my
Media Creation Tools document.  This is a document that I leave intentionally varied and broad to allow for maximum student empowerment of tool selection in their learning process.
In addition to Adobe Spark, I used Powtoons to create a promotional video for our April Literacy program of Bookopoly.  This is a tool that I have used in the past, but I usually suggest it for a certain style of video and I wanted to explore how versatile it could be.  Creating this video gave me a small glimpse into the potential for creativity and opened up other projects that I do to potentially using Powtoons. 

Thing 20: Social Reading

I recently began the ISTE Certification process and one of our initial assignments had us crowdsourcing for resources to address diverse learning needs.   As I began this assignment for Crowdsourcing of Diverse Learning Resources I knew there were several ways that I could approach it.  I decided to specifically focus on diversity in a cultural sense, as it is something that I have been exploring through my role both in the library and the purchase of books and as a member of our Diversity Committee at Lake George.  This fits nicely with the ISTE Collaborator strand which explicitly develops "cultural competency when communicating with students, parents and colleagues", as well as inspiring me to utilize some of the tools I have been exploring for social reading.

With all of the new tools out there I have been wanting to utilize some of the curation elements to connect to our reading culture.  I gathered titles to curate for student access that would reflect the theme of cultural diversity.  I used two methods of curation, with Destiny Collections and Sora, creating two points of access for students to explore diverse titles.  This will allow them to be empowered and self-directed in their selection of books to expand their cultural understanding and experiences.  The curation of these titles is a step in our process of developing cultural competency within our school community.  The tools I explored provide a natural access point for students.  These are resources and tools I will use again for collaboration and curation.  Now that I have learned the process and potential I look forward to seeing the student engagement.

My next steps are to increase the activity of our avid readers on Goodreads.  I have a handful of students who use it to write and share reviews as well as keep track of their reading lives.  This has been a great method of collaboration and communication with them, but I want to spread that usage.  Right now I am working with a small group of readers participating in a Battle of the Books reunion, and see the potential of getting them connected in that way.  

Thing 12: News Literacy

I really enjoyed the News Literacy Project!  I went through their collection of free lessons, taking them as a student, and thought they were very well done.  Even the vocabulary and context they presented will be valuable tools to use with students.  I always question how prepared I am to teach lessons on fake news, which after doing these lessons I will call misinformation and disinformation, but going through these lessons gave me more confidence in my own understanding and ability to identify valid stories and sources. 

Bridget and I are also preparing for our second annual "Coffee Click", a time when we meet with parents to educate them on a timely topic that their students are learning about.  Last year we covered eReading, and focused on OverDrive.  This year we would like to tackle the topic of Sifting through all of the information out there and being prepared to identify what is real.  This is particularly timely right now, in light of the Momo challenge, and school districts jumping to share information that they themselves had not verified.  We will use many of the resources explored through this "thing".  Both of us have ordered the new book by Jennifer Lagarde, Fact vs. Fiction, and we are considering using that for the foundation of this Coffee Click.  I am also considering sending parents to the News Literacy Project for a follow up lesson after we meet. 
As the advisor for our student newspaper I also am looking for opportunities to share the resources here with my student reporters.  I am hoping to use the Pulitzer Center lessons on "World Press Freedom Day", and inspire my newspaper students to create some school-wide activities.  I shared many of the lessons from the Pulitzer Center with individual teachers as well. 
I have spent a lot of time working my way through the resources here, and look forward to continuing to implement them integrated into lessons throughout the year.  One example that I will use immediately is a quick tool for evaluating websites, which I will be using this week with 7th grade students doing science research.  I created this as a Google Form, and will present it as an exit ticket type activity, which will allow us to stimulate good conversation and raise awareness as students search, without creating a labor intensive process. 

Thing 5: Audio Tools

I have been doing audio book reviews with 8th graders for years, but this thing inspired me to take that to the next level.  I always called them "podcasts", but they really weren't because it was never gathered to be presented that way.  I have previously been sharing them through QR Codes on books, which was effective, but limited access to physical presence in the library.  Through this "thing" I explored Anchor, and have so far published three episodes of our "LG Reads" podcast.  This allows me to share the student reviews through our library social media, as well as providing access on the books through QR Codes. 

While working through this process I also explored the tools Beautiful Audio Editor (Chrome Extension) and Clyp: https://clyp.it/ , which I may use in the future instead of Audacity. I was able to provide them as options for seniors doing interactive exhibits this month, however none of the students opted to try them, instead using QuickTime to create screencasts. One of my frustrations with audio is that we can't embed it into Google Slides, which would increase the ease of access and sharing to a broader audience.
As I explore tools for creation of audio, and ideas for sharing/ presenting audio, I have also made it a point to explore quality audio content by subscribing to a few Podcasts myself. I have been enjoying "So We've Been Thinking" and "Hey YA", although the challenge continues to be finding time to enjoy this media type, as it isn't my "go-to" in the way that blogs and visual content would be.

Thing 3: Photo Fun

My goal for this thing was to explore more potential on Social Media for the library.  We have a Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat and Instagram, but I am not very consistent in how I use them.  Part of this is the time factor, which is always going to be a factor, but part of it is also being purposeful in reaching my audience through these different tools.

I really appreciated the article that said, "Facebook is old school, Twitter is succinct, Instagram is highly polished and curated but Snapchat is silly and goofy and fun."  I typically share all of my posts across platforms, but this got me think not only about there being different audiences, but also a different purpose within these medias.
Since then I have been asking myself more about the type of content and tone/ mood being shared through each.  I would say that Facebook reaches more of an adult audience, in particular our school community (teachers and parents, etc.), Twitter is my professional platform where I connect with other educators both within and outside of my school, SnapChat and Instagram are more where students live.  Even within these medias I should have a different type of presence though- lighter on SnapChat and more polished on Instagram.

To this end, I have spent some time playing- especially on SnapChat.  I created a Filter and experimented with sharing it for others to download- that could be a lot of fun incorporated into some broader contest or interactive board, so I will revisit it when we do Bookopoly later this spring.

Some of the ideas I have for hashtags for rotating/ intentionally presenting pictures are listed below:
Book Snaps
#LGMakers
#LGReads
#EmpoweredLearner
Global Connections