BlogWalker

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Digital Citizenship in Action

October 1, 2018
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“Hacking the Learning Standards” with #DigCit Connections

 

“Stop thinking about digital citizenship as a stand-alone technology topic and begin thinking about it as an essential component of a well-rounded humanities curriculum.” Kristen Mattson, Digital Citizenship in Action

A top priority of my day-time job is co-directing my district’s Digital Citizenship program. Last week a teacher at one of our elementary sites reached out with concerns about a recent string of events, ranging from cyberbullying to even an attempted hack into some of their canned curriculum programs. As the computer resource teacher (CRT), he is the single staff member tasked with teaching digital citizenship, the norm for most of our elementary schools.

Yes, that would be teaching “digital citizenship as a stand-alone technology topic.” My co-director, Kathleen Watt, and I are constantly rethinking best practices to help teachers embed digital citizenship into the core curriculum in ways that go beyond stand-alone or one-and-done approaches and that bring students into an on-going conversation and commitment to practice good citizenship in person and online.

We often share (tweet, blog, text, email) #digcit tips from Kristen Mattson, pulling from her wonderful ISTE publication Digital Citizenship in Action – Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities. So I was delighted this week to receive the fall edition of ISTE’s quarterly magazine, Empowered Learner, in which Dr. Mattson’s article “Embed digital citizenship in all subjects” is the featured spotlight article. The article is a reminder and wake-up call to start “hacking learning standards to create opportunities to weave digital citizenship education into content area classes.” This process is exactly what Kathleen and I needed to help our elementary teacher.

Adding to the process, Saturday morning I received an email notification that Nicole Nadiz had posted new content to my Collaboration in Common feed: Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Digital Citizenship. I love this Google Doc! It’s a road map to “hacking learning standards.” Nicole has paired CCSS with Model School Library Standards (MSLS) and Common Sense Education. It took all of 3 minutes to add Common Sense Digital Citizenship connections to the Teacher Notes of our ART of Reading Laterally lesson. One down, three to go (The Forbidden Treasure, On Coming to America, I’m Not Leaving).

Whether it’s your own curriculum or district-adopted curriculum, having Nicole Nadiz’s document really speeds up the process for making the digital citizenship connections for whatever Common Core ELA Standards are listed in a lesson. Please note that Nicole has also invited educators to add their lesson samples via this Google Form. I just submitted The Art of Reading Laterally.

“Helping students explore the fine line between our technology and our humanity can be the work of every educator if we’re willing to be creative in the ways we think about curriculum and the ways we think about digital citizenship.” Kristen Mattson

#digcitcommit

 

November 9, 2013
by blogwalker
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A Shoutout to Kentucky, Fearless Explorers of the Common Core

I kicked off the 3-day weekend (Thank you, Veterans!) with a cup of coffee and the September 30 edition of Time Magazine. It was the cover story on Google that prompted me to purchase a copy, but while flipping backwards through the pages, I found Amanda Ripley’s article The New Smart Set – What happens when millions of kids are asked to master fewer things more deeply?

Between background on how the Common Core Standards were created (Sorry, Tea Party goers, but “the federal government had nothing to do with their creation; sorry, “leftist critics,” but the CCSS were “developed by teachers and researchers at the behest of a bipartisan group of governors and state education leaders,” not by “corporate reforms.”) and Kentucky’s pioneering process and results, I highly recommend this article for educators, parents, and politicians.

From my 20+ years as an educator, I’m a firm believer that any new program needs 3 years of implementation before its value can truly be assessed and judged. Such is the case with Kentucky’s roll out of the Common Core. Year 1 (2010) was met with a normal amount of concern, fear, and frustration over standards that were intended to take students deeper into English Language Arts and Math than previous state standards. As they headed into the first round of testing synced to the Common Core, state officials communicated to parents, teachers, and students that “if you raise the bar, fewer will reach it – at least for a while.” Teachers had flyers to share with parents and PTAs provided briefings. Clearly, the communication piece was seen as central to the shift to Common Core.

And the results … drum roll please … In Year 2, the second year of testing, “Student scores rose 2 percentage points, with the portion of college and career-ready students up 20 percent to 54 percent since 2010. The graduation rate has increased to 86 percent from 80 percent in 2010 since the adoption of the standards” (from the Council of Chief State School Officials). The  overall rise in test scores from Year 1 to Year 2 might seem small, but thanks to a little mentoring from University of California at Davis professor and researcher Carl Whithaus, I know that a 2% statewide gain is significant.

As my school district heads into CCSS field testing, with a bit of apprehension over the technology integration (both for the infrastructure and the devices students will use for the testing), I know I will continue to check back to Kentucky’s Department of Education site to keep up with their Friday Fast Five.

Thank you, Kentucky, for being the first to dive into the Common Core challenge and for sharing your lessons learned.

October 21, 2013
by blogwalker
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Benefits of Being a Connected Educator: CCSS Resources

I am a connected educator. Through dynamic networks such as Twitter, the National Writing Project, MERIT, and Google Certified Teachers, I can start every day with amazing new resources and thought-provoking, shared conversations on educational topics – such as the Common Core State Standards. Below are a few of my favorite CCSS-related links that have come my way over the past year:

    • Common Core and Ed Tech blog – In less than a year since going live with this blog, middle school teachers (and MERIT 2011 colleagues) Gene Tognetti and Karen Larson have had over 30,000 visitors to their site. It’s the inviting conversational tone and innovative mix of technology and CCSS that makes this blog such a valuable resource. I thought, for instance, that I was pretty familiar with the resources posted to the Buck Institute’s Project-Based Learning pages until I read Gene’s post Three easy to understand presentation rubrics from bie.org. Because I’m fortunate to know both Gene and Karen personally, I know the CCEdTech blog will continue to be a resource that connected educators can contribute to and learn from.
    • Buck Institute of Education’s Rubrics – The BIE’s CCSS-aligned rubrics, such as the Presentation Rubric for PBL, help teachers guide students in making effective presentations in a PBL project and assess their performance. To keep up with all-things PBL, I recommend connecting with Suzie Boss via Twitter (@suzieboss) and  through @edutopia.
    • Teaching Channel –  With 117 videos to date focused on making the CCSS understandable to viewers by filming real teachers with real students, the Teaching Channel is an invaluable just-in-time resource. I welcome the regular email  updates from Sara Brown Wessling‘s listserv letting me know when new videos are available, such as the examples below that provide insights on different approaches to teaching “close reading.” A great teachers-teaching-teachers model!

It’s hard to imagine fully embracing/questioning/teaching the Common Core without my daily dose of connected educators’  mentoring and inspiration via a variety of social networks. My goal for the new school year is to share a monthly post with more CCSS resources. Please jump into the conversation if you have favorite CCSS resources and/or strategies to share.

January 5, 2013
by blogwalker
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Google Teacher Academy Gem #2 – Advanced search for primary sources

This post is a part of a continuing set of reflections on my favorite take-aways from my whirlwind two days at the December Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View.

Following Jennie Magiera’s introduction during the opening round of “Demo Slams” to the Chrome extension Webpage Screenshot, Mark Hammons stepped up to the mic and walked us through the steps of using Google’s Advanced News Search feature to locate amazing primary sources available through the News Archives, such as newspaper clippings from the 1860’s that reference Abraham Lincoln.  You will definitely want to share Mark’s video (below) with your history/social studies teachers.  A perfect exercise for meeting CCSS requirements to provide students with access to primary source documents! Thanks, Mark!

Oh, but wait…..there’s more to share on how to search the News Archives.  Dan Russell, Google’s Search King, just created Google News Archive …fast (see video below), with the invitation to share out with other teachers. Thanks, Dan, for a perfect clip to add to Mark’s. Google and Google leaders are simply amazing!

November 12, 2011
by blogwalker
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Tora! Tora! Tora! – Why students need access to primary sources

A local TV station kicked off the Veterans Day weekend with a showing of Tora! Tora! Tora! With an all-star cast, I certainly do not question why this 1970’s portrayal of the bombing of Pearl Harbor deserves recognition as an American classic. A number of lines from the movie, however, reminded me of the importance of providing students with access to a broad collection of primary sources for learning about World War II.

It is often through snippets of first-hand accounts of a historical event, that students begin to question information – such as the accounts provided by textbooks. As I listened to one of the American officers in Tora! Tora! Tora! explain that the real danger was the hundreds of Japanese living in Hawaii, I thought about a government propaganda clip, Japanese Relocation, that explained (justified) the need to remove thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage from the West Coast. This government clip provides insight into the political climate of the war years.

But history is all about who is telling the story.  In working on the Time of Remembrance Oral Histories Project, a project I’ve been involved in for that last six years, I find that with each new interview, my understanding of the internment experience deepens, as does my appreciation for war time complexities.

I recently added ten new interviews to the Time of Remembrance collection. Each story is a reminder of what can happen if we allow the loss of rights to any group of people to go unchallenged. Each story is also a reminder that history happens one story at a time.

The additions to the  Interview Archives include first-hand accounts from:

  • Jack Dairiki – Born in Sacramento, Jack recounts his trip to Japan in 1941, being caught there, and surviving the bombing of Hiroshima.
  • Jim Tanimoto – I met Jim last spring during an annual Pilgrimage to Manzanar. Jim’s story is the first in our collection from a No-No boy, a term for resisters. No-No boys answered “No” to questions 27 and 28 on the Loyalty Oath they were required to take.
  • Gary Shiota – Gary explains the issues of the Loyalty Oath.
  • Jim Tanaka – Jim provides a window into the 442nd experience and the experience of the 100th battalion from Hawaii.
  • Roy Sato – Roy shares experiences of signing up for draft and being classified as “4C” – an “enemy alien.”
  • Marion Kanemoto – One of the most powerful stories in the TOR collection, Marion tells of being sent to Japan as part of a prisoner exchange. In later years, with a little help from her law student son, she literally changes history.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll also be uploading a set of powerful lessons created by 12 teachers in my district.  This incredibly talented panel is making available to you grade-level (grades 5-12), standards-aligned lessons that weave in the TOR interview segments. You are free to download, share, and tweak these lessons in anyway that works best for you and your students.

It is my hope that the primary sources provided through the Time of Remembrance site will engage students in “doing history” as opposed to just “studying history.”  Whatever the historical event, all students should have opportunities to construct knowledge and exam differing points of view, and, in the process, gain a sense of what it was like to live through events from the past. The Common Core State Standards support the integration of primary sources into the curriculum because reading through first-hand accounts of any event invites the development of critical thinking and helps students to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.”

As for Tora! Tora! Tora!, it just seems that 70 years later, a movie trailer might be appropriate – one that makes clear that actually not a single Japanese-American citizen was ever found guilty of espionage or traitorous activities.

Wishing everyone a restful, reflective Veterans Day:-)

August 12, 2011
by blogwalker
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David Coleman on Teaching Reading

What the world needs most right now is wonderful questions about things worth reading. Things worth read and rereading that don’t avoid the text but bring kids into a deeper consideration of it.” David Coleman

David Coleman?  Although I’ve been visiting the Common Core State Standards site for over a year now, it was just this morning that I came across a link to New York State’s Bringing the Common Core Standards to Life. So I now know that David Coleman is a “leading author and architect of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).”

I scrolled down the menu of video clips uploaded from Coleman’s April 23 presentation and clicked on the Discussion for Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy and “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” Letter by Martin Luther King, Jr:

It took a few minutes for the clip to download – but it was worth it! Simply put, Coleman wants students to learn to think by analyzing what they’re reading. He also questions some popular pre-reading strategies, such as providing students with background information on a document by starting with a summary: “You would be stunned in curricular materials how often a text is trivially summarized before it begins. If this is all King had to offer were those conclusions, we should not do the work of reading the letter altogether.” Lots of food for thought! And I like that a transcript for each video is also available.

Heading back to the Bringing the Common Core Standards to Life in search of some more David Coleman gems…

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