Digital Citizens of Alkek Elementary
We have taken large strides as a campus and we have jumped off into the ocean of blended learning! Almost all of our classrooms are 1:1 with devices for learning and creating. Our students are becoming immersed in the digital world and are learning multiple tools and applications for their technology usage beyond the gaming world. To make sure our students are aware of what dangers can be present while participating in the digital world I felt the need to incorporate lessons to educate our students, at each level, to ensure their safety.
For the past two weeks I used two different curriculums to address the topics and needs of our students and matched these lessons to ensure they were developmentally appropriate for each grade level. Kinder through third grade were guided through lessons in Common Sense media. For our fourth and fifth grade students I used Google for Education's "Be Internet Awesome" curriculum. Both are amazing at engaging and promoting good digital citizenship in our digital world!
PreK/PPCD
Last Week:
Digital citizenship rings different for our littles and can easily be tied to everyday real world situations. Our students listened to the book "Never Talk to Strangers" and we learned how to avoid people we don't know and what to do if approached by strangers.
This week:
Continuing our digital citizenship lessons and blending in February's month of kindness remembrance, kinder students created a list of ways to be a good friend to others and to be kind. They watched a Vooks presentation of "Stick and Stone" to see how these two unlikely characters develop an important
friendship.
Kinder
Last Week:
Balancing screen time and off screen time is important for healthy, whole body development. Our Kinder students met the Digi Citizens Head, Heart, Arms, Guts, Legs, and Feet. Each character represents a part of us that we must use to be good digital citizens. This lesson's focus was on why we should balance our screen time an off screen time along with how to do this.
This week:
We met Corey Carson who helped us in our digital citizen development to become more aware of how we treat others and how we can make new friends safely. Then the students created their own pictures of them being good friends to someone else.
First Grade
Last Week:
Students met our Digi Citizens as we began our unit on digital citizenship and what that means. Our students learned each character's connection and how we use our whole bodies to make good choices when we are online. Our focus centered on how we stay safe online by following the internet traffic light when visiting sites.
This Week:
In continuation of our digital citizenship lessons and blending in February's kindness acts we talked about how we can be bucket fillers and takers. The students listened to "How Full is Your Bucket, for kids" Then helped to write a list of bucket filling ways to be.
Second Grade
Last week:
Knowing what information to share online and what information should be kept private is often times a challenge for our students. In this week's lesson we learned from our digi citizens what information is okay to share online and what information we should not share.
This week:
We learned what a digital trail and digital footprint is and how the information we post can sometimes give others online a way to trace our digital footprints easier than other times. Students pretended to be detectives and they followed the digital trail of two characters, then evaluated which character was a better digital citizen.
Third Grade
Last Week:
Students learned what a community is and how we can belong to more than one community. We also talked about the norms found in each community, or the expected behaviors and routines. Students helped develop an anchor chart with the norms we find in schools. Together as a group we viewed different online communities, their goals, and their norms to determine how the norms and goals were connected within each community.
This Week:
The power of words sometimes is not as recognizable by our younger students, even some of our older students struggle with this. We discussed the terms interpret and empathy and how we could relate events in our lives to these two terms. Students then practiced identifying words that should be said to others online and words that could have a negative impact on someone without even knowing it.
Fourth Grade/Fifth Grade
Last Week:
Many students do not realize how easy their private information can be retrieved if their privacy settings are not up to date, even adults can forget this. We worked through together using Pear Deck and Google for Education to learn how to change the privacy settings on our Google accounts to ensure no one can retrieve too much information about us!
Author Visit!!! Michael Finklea
I was so excited to be able to bring an author for our students to learn more about the writing process and to meet an individual who has overcome struggles to achieve their goals! Michael Finklea brought his books and shared his persona story with us on how he became an author. I loved the fact that so many of our students were inspired they came to school the next day with written compositions to share when he returned for more book sales. I feel like everyone walked away with motivation and encouragement to find their inner strength and to stick with their dreams, no matter how big or small they are! Mr. Finklea personally told me that our students were the best group that he has ever presented for, he loved the questions that were asked, and that he was truly impressed by our support in his book sales. Thank you so much to the parents who gave their children the opportunity to purchase a book from this event, it will remain with them for a lifetime! If your child was not able to purchase a book at this time no worries, there will be several copies of each in the library for our students to check out.
Book Fair is Coming!!!! It's Sure to be a Wild event!
Our second book fair for the year is quickly approaching! The dates are set for February 24th - 28th. Tuesday the 25th will be our late day where we will be open until 6:00pm. You all made our first fair so successful I look forward to what you can do with our spring numbers! This is a great time to stock up on Easter gifts, summer reading materials, and just to own some great books too!
Please sign up to help work the bookfair if you can! Our volunteers are who keep us up and running throughout the day!
