netiquette – iLearn Technology

Google Digital Literacy Tour

January 4, 2012Kelly Tenkely6 Comments4250 views

What it is: No matter what subject(s) you teach, digital literacy is something we all need to take the responsibility to expose our students to. iKeep Safe (one of my favorites for Internet safety with Faux Paw the Techno cat!) teamed up with Google to create a curriculum for educators to teach what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. The outcome is wonderful, it is designed to be interactive, discussion oriented, and hands-on. Each separate piece of curriculum (workshop) includes a pdf resource booklet for both educators and students, videos to accompany lessons, and presentations. The three workshops available are:

Detecting Lies and staying true
Playing and staying safe online
Steering clear of cyber tricks

How to integrate Google Digital Literacy Tour into the classroom: Google never disappoints, and the Google Digital Literacy Tour is no exception! These are a great discussion starters for every classroom. I like this Digital Literacy Tour because it doesn’t give a lot of drill and kill type exercises to find out if the student can tell you the “correct” answer. Instead, it invites conversations and deeper thinking…exactly what is needed for true digital literacy!

The videos and presentations can be used throughout the year (and multiple times throughout the year) to open discussions about online behavior. Too often educators assume that because students are adept at using technology, that means they know how to properly use that technology. Students can understand the freedom and benefits that technology brings without knowing how to properly manage that freedom, that is what digital literacy is all about! It is up to us to help students understand what their digital relationships represent in real life, and how their actions online can affect what they do in real life.

Use the Google Digital Literacy Tour as a conversation starter for the whole class or ask students to break into smaller groups to discuss before they share with the larger group. If you have some added time for reflection, ask students to write about their own experiences, or reflection, on why digital literacy is important. Every year I have taught Internet safety, I am amazed by what students tell me they have encountered online! I am telling you now, no matter what grade you teach, your students have encountered something online that they didn’t know what to do with. Help them navigate that!

Tips: Share these resources with parents. They often hear reports that emphasize the negative aspects of online behavior and, instead of teaching students how to properly manage their freedom, restrict it all together. This is okay for the short term but does nothing that is beneficial for students long term!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Google Digital Literacy Tour in your classroom!

Class Blogs: Blogging, virtual classroom, LMS, and more!

March 28, 2011Kelly Tenkely6 Comments3695 views

What it is: Class Blogs is a fabulous new way for you to easily create and manage FREE classroom blogs! What makes Class Blogs so wonderful are all the extras that are built in. For example, with Class Blogs you can create a virtual classroom space. With just a few simple steps, you can create an online meeting space for your students to learn and discuss in. Blogs can be used to post assignments; when you post an assignment to your teacher blog, students can submit the assignment and a pingback will be sent to your blog. Class Blogs even has features that utilize SMS so that you can send a text message to students and the ability to host lesson plans complete with supporting resources! Class blogs really offers more than just a blogging platform, it offers many Learning Management System (LMS) solutions making it a great all-in-one tool! Here are just a few of the ways you can use Class Blogs:

Class Blogs – Teachers and students can create blogs to help facilitate classroom learning or the blog can be an extension of the classroom conversation.

Learning Logs – Learning logs are sites created by teachers for the purpose of creating online assignments for students. Students can then answer the questions and submit the assignments once they are completed.

Learning Management System (LMS) – Teachers can create a blog and use it as a learning management system. Teachers can post online courses and students can submit their assignments (through blog posts) for the course online as well. These assignments can be viewed by the instructor, the instructor can submit feedback, and the instructor can grade the student’s assignment online. Both the teacher and his/her students must have blogs in order to create a successful LMS.

Electronic Portfolio (E-Portfolio) – An e-portfolio is a valuable learning and assessment tool which includes but is not limited to a collection of resources and accomplishments that represent the individual. Moreover, it is the author’s personal reflection on the work included in the e-portfolio that creates a meaningful learning experience.

Web Conferencing/Virtual Classroom – Teachers/professors have the ability to create meeting rooms or virtual classrooms from the backend of their site. You can upload your presentations, chat with students, public/private chat, webcam, and even share your desktop.

How to integrate Class Blogs into the classroom: Class Blogs has features that make it wonderfully useful for any classroom. Blogging gives your students a place to write where they have an authentic audience. An audience of one (the teacher) is SO 1995. To limit your students to that audience is a disservice. I find that when my students write in blog form, the enthusiasm to write increases, the richness of language increases, and the ideas are communicated clearly. Obviously that is a bit of a generalization, I have also had students who don’t want to post for an audience, it makes them nervous to reveal themselves to their classmates in that way. I let those students blog about topics they are “experts” on as they are building confidence in their learning process. Students can blog to reflect on learning; write creatively; write as if they were a historical character, famous inventor, or a favorite literary figure; to chronicle learning (e-portfolio style); or to invite others on a journey of inquiry with them.

Using this type of social media in the classroom is important. It helps students learn digital citizenship, Internet safety, and netiquette in an authentic environment that goes beyond the rules and actually lets them practice it.

The additional features of Class Blog make it the perfect place to organize your classroom. Post assignments in Class Blogs as a learning log, as students respond, your original post will get a pingback making it easy to track students progress. Class Blog also makes it easy to extend learning beyond the four walls of your classroom using the virtual classroom features. Create meeting rooms to extend classroom discussions, offer additional learning support, or as a place to prepare students for learning. Class Blogs makes it easy to include podcasts, videos, webcams, private chat areas, desktop sharing in your virtual classroom.

Tips: Class Blogs does not have an age requirement, this means that it is available to k-12 (and beyond) education. Registration does require an email address. If your students do not have email addresses, you can create accounts on their behalf. With Class Blogs you can create unlimited class and student blogs, unlimited free classes/courses, and unlimited free virtual classrooms. Be sure to check out the feature page for a comprehensive list of the awesome features on Class Blogs, you won’t believe what all is included!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using the Class Blogs in your classroom!

My Online Neighborhood: Internet Safety

March 23, 2011March 23, 2011Kelly Tenkely2 Comments2472 views

What it is: I learned about this gem of a video today from my friend @techfacil. My Online Neighborhood is a video created by Common Sense Media. The video is a great way to introduce kindergarten through third grade students to online safety. I like how this video compares the online world with the real world. This helps students understand the rules in a way that goes deeper than just following the rules because we say so. The video approaches Internet safety in a fun way through the eyes of a student, as you will see above, it is very well done!

How to integrate My Online Neighborhood into the classroom: My Online Neighborhood is a nice entry point for teaching Internet safety. Use the video to spur classroom discussions about online safety. The video also makes a nice lead in to the Internet safety lessons from Common Sense Media on Digital Life (sending email, online communities, rings of responsibility), Privacy (follow the digital trail), Connected Culture (screen out the mean, show respect online, power of words, group think, writing good emails), and Respecting Creative Work (whose is it, anyway?). These units and lessons are detailed, fun, and get right to the heart of the matter of raising digitally responsible citizens. The lesson plans are leveled by grade and can be used for kindergarten through fifth grade.

Tips: There are some fantastic parent tips and resources on the Common Sense Media website, be sure to share them with your families so that online safety is modeled and reinforced at home.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using My Online Neighborhood in your classroom!

Fakebook and Twister- Create custom social media pages for learning

March 14, 2011Kelly Tenkely8 Comments9826 views

What it is: I don’t know if you all noticed, but I have been on a serious social media kick lately. 🙂 There is just SO much for students to learn from the social media sphere. Last week (or was it the week before?) I shared that I had created a Facebook Template that could be used with students for creating a fake Facebook profile. Since then I have come across Fakebook created by teacher, @russeltarr. I have one word: Brilliant. Seriously this is the BEST Fakebook tool I have seen. It is simple to use. Just click and type. The profile pictures get pulled automatically based on the name that students type in. Especially good for literary and historical characters! The focus here really is on the learning that it enables, there are NO advertisements (unlike Myfakewall which I have deemed unusable because of all of the ads).

The other fake social networking tool I want to feature is called Twister. This is a fake Twitter wall that students can create just by filling in a few key bits of information like a username, the real name (this is what the photo pulls from), a status update, and a date. When students click submit, they have their very own fictional status update. Very cool!

These tools are fantastic for the classroom because they don’t rely on actual social network sites (which are often blocked by filters), they are not limited by age to use them, and they provide a fun way for students to reflect on learning. So neat!

How to integrate Fakebook and Twister into the classroom: These two teacher created tools are fantastic. They produce results that look like the real deal and were obviously created by teachers who understand that the focus should be learning and not the tool (or advertisements surrounding the tool). These fake profile/status creators are a wonderful way for students to learn about historical and literary figures in a manner that they can personally connect to. Students can create profiles or updates from the perspective of historical figures, literary characters, government, artists, composers, etc. Students can also use these tools to help them develop characters for their own writing.

Take a page out of the Grammaropolis book and have students personify things they are learning about like parts of speech. Students can create a profile for each part of speech. How about creating a profile page for math functions like Number Gossip does? Students could even practice dialogue in a foreign language using either tool.

Teaching your students netiquette? Let students create two versions of a Fakebook page, one with appropriate online interaction and another that “breaks the rules” to compare/contrast.

The Twister site only lets you create one status update at a time. This makes it really nice for memorializing famous or favorite quotes. These would be fun to print out and display on a bulletin board.

Tips: Students can save or print out their Fakebook page. To save, they will create a password and need to write down the unique URL for their page to access it at a later date.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Fakebook and Twister in your classroom!

National Geographic Kids Animal Jam Virtual World

July 16, 2010July 19, 2010Kelly Tenkely6 Comments3751 views

What it is: National Geographic Kids is a constant source of excellent activities but their new Animal Jam virtual world is above and beyond my favorite. My students love virtual worlds, they enjoy being immersed in a story, sent on a mission, and interacting with each other to complete adventures and learn. Animal Jam lets them do all of these things while providing a virtual world where they can discover real-world plant and animal information and follow a rich storyline that has National Geographic’s multi-media content built in. Cool huh?! Animal Jam does something else, it excites students to learn more about the real world around them, so when they aren’t playing in the virtual world, they will be excited to learn more about the world they live in. The virtual world is an easy one for students to pick up on and learn, it is perfect for young students and caters to their specific levels of play and developmental stages. Animal Jams will be one of those environments that is as appealing to fourth grade students as it is to first grade students. The online environment is safe and monitored so you can feel comfortable introducing it in your classroom. Each portion of the sign up process is narrated so it is easy for even young students to sign up. The site requires a parent’s email address to sign up, the email is required but does not have to be verified before play can begin. In a classroom setting, a teacher or classroom email address could be used for sign-up. The email address allows an adult to monitor and adjust settings in a child’s game.

How to integrate National Geographic Kids Animal Jam into the classroom: After students sign up, they are entered into the magical world of Jamma where they are introduced to the world. Each portion of the game is narrated making it accessible to early readers, struggling readers, and English language learners. As students explore the world of Jamma, they will find embedded learning about different kinds of plants and animals along with incredible National Geographic images. Animal Jam is a nice environment to let your young students practice what they are learning about online safety and netiquette. As students explore Jamma, they will learn about links, navigation with mouse and arrow keys, and learn fun facts in the process.

Every primary curriculum that I have seen carves out time for students to learn about plants and animals. Animal Jam is a fun place for them to discover this learning within the virtual world. Send your students on expeditions and adventures to find these learning opportunities. As they play in Animal Jam, students can keep an observation journal where they record the plants and animals they are discovering like a scientist would. Ask your students how many of the plants and animals they can find in real life around their homes. If you are learning about ecosystems and environments, ask students to count and name the different ecosystems they can spot in Animal Jam. This site is ideal for the computer lab setting, make sure to at least begin the game in the computer lab where each student has a computer. After the kids are signed up and familiar with the world, it could become a center activity for your classroom computers throughout the year.

Tips: Right now Animal Jam is in Beta. The world is free to join and play in but premium accounts are also available to students.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Animal Jam in your classroom.

Think U Know Cyber Cafe

June 2, 2010Kelly Tenkely7 Comments7857 views

What it is: Think U Know Cyber Cafe is a virtual environment where students can practice their online safety smarts. In the cafe, students will help virtual kids make good choices when using email, texting, instant messaging, web browsing, creating an online personal space, and chatting in a chat room. Students are guided through a variety of scenarios where they must help the virtual kids make the right decisions about using the Internet.

How to integrate Think U Know Cyber Cafe into the classroom: Kids spend an enormous amount of their time online. Just because they use the Internet a lot, doesn’t mean that they are good users of the Internet. Many students haven’t had adequate practice with protecting their online identity, keeping track of their digital footprints, or using proper netiquette. Students need to learn the appropriate way to use online spaces. The Think U Know Cyber Cafe is a great place for students to practice and learn how to stay safe online. Use the Cyber Cafe scenarios to guide a whole class discussion with a projector or interactive whiteboard. Discuss the different options that are presented and why one answer is better than the others. Students can also complete a tour of the Cyber Cafe on their own in a computer lab setting. Internet safety should be an ongoing discussion, we can’t assume that students will get it all the first time. Visit the cafe throughout the year for a refresher.

Tips: Check out the rest of the Think U Know website for fantastic activities and information for kids from 5-16.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Think U Know Cyber Cafe in your classroom.