Wednesday 30 May 2012

Creating Positive Habits

In elementary school, students are continually taught and reminded on how to act appropriately as learners.  Practice is really key when it comes to creating these positive habits. In order to become digital citizens, students need to have access on a regular basis so that they may develop appropriate behaviours.

In researching resources to add to my toolbox I found that there were 3 key sites that provided me with information to support my teaching and developing these digital citizenship qualities with my students.

The first is Creative Commons. On the website it is described as "building a culture of sharing."  This is the key to digital citizenship in my world. It means that people will have the tools to share appropriately and use other works with respect.  This website provides information about licensing your own work, searching and finding licensed works, projects being done in the digital community and how open educational resources can be used in teaching, learning and research.  This site has recently been added to my favourites tab.

The second site is International Society for Technology in Education.  This site is designed to provide educators with the standards and strategies to further education in a digital age.  The 3 principles for teaching that caught my eye are:
1. Faciliate and inspire student learning and creativity.
2. Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments.
3. Model digital age work and learning.  

Finally, Common Sense Media is a great resource for teachers! This site has resources categorized by grade level and by topic. The resources are catered for students from Kindergarten to grade 12 and are designed to provide lessons for teachers as well as parent education.  Below is a poster that can be ordered for elementary classrooms, which is just one of the easy to use resources on this website.

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/elementary_poster











1 comment:

  1. These look to be some very useful resources, Janelle! Thanks for sharing them. I do think the idea of making good citizenship a habit is a fundamentally important approach. We practice, we get good at things, we practice some more, and they become habitual. The cognitive principle of automaticity comes to mind.

    Of the three you mention, Creative Commons, is a very special initiative. It has given people who are predisposed to share their work some very practical tools for making sharing the things we create, and assigning only the protections we think are necessary and important. It's one of the most important initiatives I know of, and something every teacher should become intimately familiar with.

    ReplyDelete