Digital Citizenship Week - October 18th through October 24th

IT'S DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP WEEK.

I've been posting a tip a day about digital citizenship thanks to the help of Common Sense Media. I have been sharing these tips to my professional learning communities, emailing to staff, and sharing on our school's social media pages. Digital Citizenship is an important topic that often gets missed when we get our kids online, whether at school or at home. Below are the tips that I have shared and will be sharing this week. It's never too late to have the digital citizenship conversation and keep your kids safe, respectful, and responsible online.


Monday - Today's Tip: Be Safe


Often children don't understand the importance of internet safety and that how talking to a stranger online is just as dangerous as talking to a stranger in public.
KEEP PRIVATE THINGS PRIVATE.
Talk about what’s OK for kids to share online and what’s not.

• Younger kids: Get kids to think about safety without scaring them. Don’t share your name, address, school, age, etc. Ask: Why don’t we want strangers to know certain things about us or our family?
• Older kids: Don’t broadcast your location, send photos to strangers, or share passwords with friends. Ask: What kind of information can be unsafe to share, and what’s fair game?

Talk to your kids about being safe online. Here are some great resources from NetSmartz that can help http://www.netsmartz.org/InternetSafety

Tuesday - Today's Tip: Be Kind


Try to instill a sense of empathy in your kids. We should always act online the way we are to act with others face to face.
Remember: there’s someone else on the other side of the screen.
Did you know that writing in all caps can make the other person think that you are yelling or angry with them?
It's hard to detect emotions through writing in an online environment. Make sure to think about what you say, could it make someone else feel sad or mad if they read it the wrong way?

• Younger kids: Treat others like you want to be treated -- and always follow a website’s rules for behavior. Ask: How do you see other kids behaving online? What are some nice things you’ve seen other kids do?
• Older kids: Post constructive comments, and avoid getting into flame wars with trolls. Ask:What kind of positive behavior do you see online?

Wednesday - Today's Tip: Be Responsible

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE.

Just because it’s online doesn’t make it true. Not everybody is who they say they are.

• Younger kids: Teach kids to be detectives. Ask: How can you tell whether something is true online? What are some signs that something might not be true?
• Older kids: Use reputable sources. Learn to recognize red flags. Ask: How can you tell what’s a reliable source of information? What are some signs something’s a scam?

Thursday - Today's Tip: Be Safe


DON’T OVERSHARE.

Think before you post. Use privacy settings.

• Younger kids: Help kids understand what sharing something online means. Ask: Who can see what you’re doing or saying online?

• Older kids: Encourage kids to pause before they act. Ask: What are some questions you can ask yourself before you share something online? Have you ever regretted something you’ve posted or said online?

Think about your Digital Footprint. What is a digital footprint? The information that they put online leaves a digital footprint or "trail." This trail can be big or small, helpful or hurtful, depending on how you manage it.

Friday - Today's Tip: Be Respectful


STAND UP FOR OTHERS.

If someone’s getting bullied or picked on, speak up, report it, or reach out.

• Younger kids: Make sure kids know they can come to you for help. Teach them how to flag misbehavior. Ask: What would you do if you saw someone being mean online or in a game?
• Older kids: Give kids tools to use in a crisis. Ask: If someone was being mean to you online, what would you want your friends to do? Do you know how to flag or report bullying on a social network or in a multiplayer game?

UDL: What is it, Why Does it Matter?

What is Universal Design for Learning (UDL)?

From LMC to Innovation Commons

A majority of my work this summer was focused on putting everything I had learned with readings about STEAM and Maker Spaces, as well as what I had learned form my learning experiences to schools in Finland and California, and reinvent my library media centers.  The goal was to make it more than "just a library".

Above is the LMC space prior to the redesign at Jefferson Elementary.  The space did not allow for any of the key components that were needed to shift this space to an Innovation Commons like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication.  This space was originally designed as a simple library space for book checkout and a place for students to sit at tables and work.  After visiting schools in Finland and California, I strategically redesigned the space to work in the favor of the above listed components for an Innovation Commons.

The layout to the left was designed after much thought, reflection, and collaboration with the understanding that this space needed to be a central hub for personalized learning and would help promote student achievement.

Our student population is also very genre orientated which helped me make the decision to genre catalog our fiction section.  The space still needed to promote literacy and remain a library at its core.  But through space redesign reading could be highlighted amongst the new components and the texts could support STEAM, makers, and personalized learning.

The Redesigned Space

To quote one of my students, "I love this space.  It's the best place in the whole school".  That was music to my ears.

The space to the left is our MakerSpace and STEAM Space.  It has items for student inquiry, items for the kids to create/make with, and items for students to work with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) activities for critical thinking and personalized learning.  Items in this space will continue to grow and a monthly STEAM activity will be available for students to always allow for new opportunities in critical thinking and STEAM components.  Many of the items I was able to get through Scholastic, STEMfinity, and  MakerShed.  I have been continually curating STEAM activities and projects to complete with kids, either as enrichment opportunities, independent learning activities, or after school clubs, on Pinterest.  Check out my board - https://www.pinterest.com/missandy22/steam-library-activities/

The space to the right is our E for everybody section (housing pictures books).  We have some comfortable furniture for students to read or work, highlighted new books, a carpeted area for a read aloud, and a table space for small group work or collaboration.  The furniture in this space is smaller making this space nice for younger kids.  All the books were shelved so that they are not high for the littler ones.

This space is the fiction space.  When I genre cataloged, I chose to focus on Sports, Historical Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mystery, and Series.  The redesign of the space will allow the genre cataloging to be highlighted and easy to access for students.  Each book is stickered with its own genre sticker and signs above the section match the sticker colors and the cataloging identifier (i.e. Realistic Fiction book by Carl Hiassen will be labeled in Destiny as R FIC Hia). There is a table for collaboration as well as comfortable seating for the students to lounge and read or work.

This space is the non-fiction space.  The space works as an inquiry section that not only allows a space for small group work, but also a strategically placed space off the computer lab that allows for students to research on the computer or in the non-fiction space without teachers losing sight of their students.

Within all the space, we have technology available in the form of Chromebook, PCs, and iPads, for the students to utilize.  We have a green screen kit, Safari Montage broadcasting cart, Mac creation station, and a SMART Interactive TV all setup for use as needed.  A majority of this equipment is mobile allowing for staff and students to work where best fits their needs.

We are just in the first week of my introduction of this space to students and staff but already am I getting some great feedback.  I can't tell you how excited I am to continue onward!

International Penpals

One of the best products of my trip to Finland was meeting with two educators from a Finnish school north of Helsinki.  We collaborated and put a plan in place to set up penpals between our classrooms.   We wanted our initial letters to be hand written so that the students felt they were more personal and they got the feeling of receiving something in the mail from another country.   From there, they could then continue corresponding via email or post (whichever they preferred).  We also planned to share projects that we were doing in class to help give our students a real global audience to which they could share their learning.  To do this, we set up a blog called Bridging Communities (this ties in with the Building Bridges theme from the Global Education Foundation).

Last week our first letters arrived and the students were ecstatic to receive them.  For the most part we were able to pair them one to one, boy to boy and girl to girl, with a couple sharing a pen pal or receiving two.  The students read their letters and immediately were sharing with each other and asking some questions of me, such as what team is Oulun Kärpät (a Finnish ice hockey team), what is floorball, and what is a pedal car.  The letters lead to lots of discussions about similarities and differences from Finland to the USA.

When most of the discussion had died down, the kids asked if they could begin writing their penpals back.  My response was of course.  They began writing and you could have heard a pin drop until they began sharing what they had written, asking for ideas of what to share with their penpal, and wondering if it was okay to say Americanized things in the letters like football or tv show names.

I'm so excited to continue this collaboration into future school years.  The engagement level for our students has increased for wanting to create projects to share, have time for writing, and we are building relationships that could span a lifetime.

WISELearn Digital Content Curation Training

Today I met with other educators from my area for a digital content curation training for WISELearn, a Wisconsin educator portal.  The educators were made up of different grade levels, content area, and positions in the districts of Dane, Green, Jefferson, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Walworth counties in southern Wisconsin.

What is WISELearn?

WISELearn is a portal being developed by DPI that will provide all Wisconsin educators with a place in which to collaborate and learn and where they can find content for their teaching and their own development.

WISE Learn will provide a social networking platform to support professional learning communities and repositories of a broad variety of digital material related to educators’ teaching duties and professional learning objectives.  

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is one category of content that will live in WISE Learn. Our project involves beginning to build WISELearn’s OER collection.

Project Goal

Our collective goal is to build a high quality starter collection of teaching resources for WISE Learn. In particular, we interested in an OER collection

• That was curated by Wisconsin educators, who reviewed and offered guidance for using each item;
• That was vetted using criteria drawn from Achieve’s OER rubrics and EQuIP rubrics; and
• Whose items have been correlated to Hess’s cognitive rigor matrix.  

Ideally this portal will be released in the Fall of 2015.  Some of the curation has already been completed by a couple of CESAs (Cooperative Educational Services Agencies) already in Wisconsin.  The fact that many CESAs are collaborating on this brings a variety of grade levels and content area expertise to the table.

The term OER (open educational resource) can be defined as "a general term referring to teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use."  The open movement is partly making materials available and sharable with limited restrictions.  All resources will be free and available for everyone.

Copyright is a huge issue when curating information.  With each resource we checked their copyright status and the policies aligned with the webpage we found the resource on.  WISELearn will honor the rights of authors and creators.  Curators of resources will identify the license associated with the resource.

For more information, go to: Copyright for Teachers or About Creative Commons

I won't say that this is an easy process, but the end result is going to be very beneficial to educators.  The process forces me to really look deep at the content and analyze what is there, how its used, the opportunities for deeper learning or critical thinking, and how it aligns to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards).  Questions were assessed using a rubric for how well the resource is aligned to the intent of the ELA CCSSs and what is the quality of instructional support materials, assessments, subject matter explanation, and student engagement.

The day itself allowed for a lot of collaboration to take place.  I think this is very valuable in the curation and assessment process.  Multiple viewpoints allowed for insights that one may not have gained on their own.  I know I value feedback on things I write before finally punishing them just because I worry I am not using the right words or if I am missing an important piece as an oversight.  This makes this a better resource in my opinion.

Keep an eye out for this great resource to be available this fall!


*definitions and screenshots from DPI WISELearn documents and training information.

Full STEAM Ahead!

It's been like Christmas for me the last few weeks as much of my new furniture and kits have arrived at my LMCs.  I love opening the different items for the kits and getting excited about my ideas all over again.  I have also been putting out the furniture as it has been arriving and listening to the kids as they get excited over it.  My favorite comment came from a fifth grade who said, "It's starting to look like a real library in here."  That sparked a good conversation about why it wasn't already a real library.  the biggest feedback I received is that it wasn't comfortable before to read.  We just had hard chairs and hard tables.

Today I was involved in a webinar done through DEMCO.  Amy Koester, the youth & family program coordinator at Skokie Public Library in Illinois, presented on "STEAM & the Maker Mentality for School-Age Youth".  This was one of the better webinars I have attended in awhile.  I got lots of useful information and was not overwhelmed with too much information.  Everything that was suggested was doable, the supporting information helpful, and the project ideas low-medium in cost.  All good and supportive in a public elementary school on a public elementary school library budget.  The best part is it will help when I address staff so that there is more buy-in.

I guess I should jump backwards a little bit to kind of explain what STEAM is and means.  STEAM stands for:

Since the the early 2000's, the focus on teaching arts and science together has been a hot topic.  Even Mae Jemison said in her 2002 TED Talk that "The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity."  The ultimate goal with STEAM is to foster the open-ended exploration in the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.  We need to share with the kids that there is no one right way to do things which will help their problem-solving skills.  

For more on the history of STEM: http://www.iteea.org/Resources/PressRoom/AustraliaPaper.pdf

Amy shared some important reasons for why we should have STEAM in the library.  First and foremost, the kids love it.  They enjoy the time for exploration and personalized learning.  Also, literacy is multifaceted.  Other reasons are that we foster that lifelong learning in all ages and that interest is a powerful motivator.  Carl Sagan said, "Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist."  Let's teach kids that it is okay to be daring, innovative, and to fail and try again.

Besides STEAM activities, adding the maker mentality to your LMC is also important.  The maker attitude allows for the exploration of new skills and to create something meaningful like a product or an experience.  Allowing for making in the library is a way of offering new programs and services, like STEAM it promotes lifelong learning, you can facilitate community engagement and it helps to put the library as third space (home, work/school, library).  They don't have to come to the library, they choose to come.  The best thing about having making in your library is that if you need to, you can really make it a low cost activity.  You don't need speciality materials or have a lot of experience to make.  You can also bring in community players to help facilitate the making workshops like artists.

Amy shared some go to resources that I encourage you to check out.  They help to give ideas or materials to make STEAM and MakerSpaces a part of your library.

Go-To Resources

• Books & Articles
• Janice Van Cleave
• Kids Can Press
• Gail Gibbons
• Steve Jenkins
• Melissa Stewart
• “Gaining STEAM” in LibrarySparks
• Blogs
• Abby the Librarian
• Never Shushed
• So Tomorrow
• Teen Librarian Toolbox
• Gadgets, Gizmos & Goo (G3): The Mad Scientists Club
• The Show Me Librarian
• Websites
• Steve Spangler Science
• Little eLit
• Family Engineering
• Start with a Book
• Wonderopolis
• Mixing in Math
• Bedtime Math
• Make It @ Your Library
• TinkerLab
• Pinterest