Digital+Citizenship+in+Action

**Digital Citizenship in Action - 2009 - 2010**
A variety of projects are underway in the district that incorporate 21st Century skills and require that students, teachers and administrators address the various components of digital citizenship. We will be recording our progress on this page. Our focus will continue to be on sharing how we are modeling, incorporating and teaching digital citizenship to our students through these projects.

Dawn Harvey and her 5th grade students at **Pattison Elementary** are connecting with Carlos Royal, San Diego, CA as they watch the nesting and birthing process of barn owls. Using Skype and [|uStream], students are experiencing the excitement of **connecting with a live expert**, while they ask questions, probe and view live footage of the owl and her eggs.
 * Examples:**

Grace Wenstrup, **Pattison Elementary**, is using technology with her **student-centered public broadcasting project**. She is presently looking for a grant to expand this work.

Sarah Greb, **Mulberry Elementary** has been doing **online research** with students and they are creating PowerPoints using the new laptops to share their learning. Her literature groups have been using writeboard.com to hold discussions on the chapter books they have been reading. Students are using Photostory to share their Famous Ohioan Living Museum project. In collaboration with the Language Arts teachers in 4th and 5th grade, students will be participating in a Super Summer Book Club online through Moodle. Students will be participating in real time chats about the chosen book of the month.

Mary Pat Harris, **McCormick Elementary** connected with Cincinnati Country Day to do a **collaborative math activity** over Skype. Her students have also connected with a student at an International School in Sri Lanka. They tied this visit in with their study of temperature as well as **learned about his culture**. Students are using laptops as a learning center in the classroom. She is also beginning to incorporate the use of a Flip camera to record classroom happenings. Check out her flip video on first flights with paper airplanes on her [|Glogster] page. Mary Pat researched and found that Glogster has an EDU site that has screened content appropriate for schools. Parents enjoy this window into their child's day.

April Lempa-Cooper, **Smith Elementar**y, is working on an **international "kite" project**. Students will be creating videos and uploading these to share with other classes around the world. Fourth grade students are **collaborating with a Chinese school** through the Flat Classroom project. The project is focused on heritage and has an interdisciplinary theme. Additional projects are incorporating various online resources. Sixth grade students created digital stories using Photostory. They addressed questions posed and uploaded responses to Edline.

Betsy Woods, **Milford High School**, is using laptops and a Ning with her Digital Composition Class. She is using screencasts to record instructions. As a **paperless classroom**, they use tools like Etherpad for writing and peer editing. Students in DigiComp recently learned to use Google docs for collaborative projects. Groups developed brief quizzes using Google Forms for a project that involved leading discussion about short stories. AP English Literature uses a wiki to catalog the texts they've read and may use on the AP English exam. AP English Language uses a different wiki for a year-long, collaborative vocabulary exercise.

In Melissa McGahan's class at **Seipelt Elementary**, students **connected with 80 schools around the world** using a Wiki. The project had a literature focus. They also connected with Tim Breuer's class at Meadowview to get comfortable presenting using Skype. They will be skyping in March with a virtual academy classroom in New Jersey and **comparing information on their cities** and relating this to their geography studies. She continues to explore effective ways to use SmartBoards with her students as well to engage them and provide stimulating visual material. Read her story in the discussion thread for digital citizenship in action.

Tim Breuer, **Meadowview Elementary**, has been using writeboard.com to create an online area where students can **discuss books in real time** that they are reading. During this experience one of the students changed their username to ? ? ? and began sending silly messages to other students. They discussed using first names only for safety reasons, but did not discuss using a name the others could identify them by. This created a teachable moment around digital citizenship. They discussed how anonymity can allow people to be rude or disrespectful. The class realized that if they wanted the right to not be treated rudely online then they needed to be responsible with their own actions. He setup an area on Moodle for his language arts students to work through assignments, take online assessments, and deepen their understanding of the story by posting questions about their books. Since this was an online forum, students were not giving high quality responses because a "teacher" wasn't working with them. This prompted a discussion on taking responsibility for the task required and taking ownership for their learnign. After reading a story, students drew pictures that illustrated the main idea of each chapter. These were scanned and imported into PowerPoint where students narrated their pictures into a slide show presentation. Mr. Breuer and his students discussed how their final product was a reflection on them for the world to see. Students realized if they were producing this for a larger virtual audience then they needed to be sure their work was high quality. The Moodle site was also used to differentiate for a student that was invited to attend an educational trip to the east coast. Links to sites about points of interest on the trip are available for **researching** and follow-up questions were posted for the student to question and clarify his understanding of the historical importance of site along his trip. The Wikipedia site had links to other sites which the student followed. It lead to an ad site. The student immediately informed Mr. Breuer about what had happened which prompted a class discussion on proper web etiquette and what to do if you get linked to somewhere you shouldn't be.

Roxann Schneder, **Milford Junior High**, shared information on a monarch project the Science department does yearly. This year, the monarch project moved to space through our own astronaut, teacher Steve Heck. Seventh and eighth grade students compared the development of the monarchs in their classroom while the space shuttle astronauts where conducting the same experiment. In addition, Roxann will be 21st "Centurizing" her student PowerPoint project this year by **providing students a choice** of topics along with a choice of tools to convey their message to a specified audience.