Digital Citizenship

My school is one to one with chromebooks so digital citizenship is very is something that should really get more attention at Lockport. I do not think there is enough digital citizenship training. Students have one class their freshman year that spends about a month on digital citizenship and that is about it. We are very new to the whole one to one situation so I think this may be the reason as we have not really had to worry about students having internet access at their fingertips at any time during school. Now that we are one to one we need to get on top of this.

It is difficult to teach digital citizenship in my class because I am on a relatively tight schedule with the content I have to teach but I do what I can. First of all there a few videos I can show and then discuss with my students.

What is Digital Citizenship?

Be a Digital Citizen

These two videos are a good introduction to digital citizenship. After watching the videos I can discuss what digital citizenship means to them. One nice thing that we have is an application called hapara which enables teachers to view what students are doing on their chromebooks when they are on the schools network. This helps out because teachers can explain this to students and this motivates the students to keep on task and being good digital citizens.

Source:

 BeCyberwise

Khan Academy

I decided to look into Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a great way to give students supplemental information and/or instruction on subjects. I have taken the Khan Academy chemistry section and linked it to the LMS my school uses. There are several sections that have tons of videos about all kinds of different aspects of chemistry on the site. At the beginning of the year I can introduce this as a supplamental resource that my students can use if they are confused or want to learn more about a subject we are going over. I can also use this as a supplemental material in class for different ways of explaining a concept for differentiated instruction. I could even assign certain videos for homework if I wanted to start a flipped classroom type situation. Khan Academy is a great resource that could be very beneficial to students.

At Lockport we as a district have decided to use the learning management system Haiku. Generally I very much like this LMS. Setting it up and posting assignments and resources and such is very easy. The only problem I really have with it is the calander. It is ok if you post your schedule and never change it. Unfortunately I shuffle things around, as far as my schedule goes, all the time. Moving things around on the Haiku calander is a huge pain and very counter intuitive so halfway through the year I just stopped using the calander because it would take me so long to change things around and I figured I could be using my time for better things. I would really like to either find a better calander program or solution so I can more easily have my schedule posted for my students or I wish Haiku would make the calander a little easier to work with.