Digital Citizenship

Hey, Look what I just got in my email!

Edmodo & Common Sense Media have teamed up to create a Digital Citizenship Starter Kit! The Digital Citizenship Starter Kit includes a poster, as well as a series of activities and lessons designed to introduce digital citizenship concepts directly in Edmodo. All lessons are based on Common Sense Media's K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum and include topics such as: Internet safety and security Privacy Plagiarism Cyberbullying Download the kit and discuss best practices with other educators by joining the Digital Citizenship Community on Edmodo.

Download the
Edmodo Digital Citizenship Kit

Artistic Thinking Side Note

Holy Crap.  I am sooo depressed.
Watching those two documentaries my mind is blown. Some of these issues I was already aware of. Other things were revelations.

I am a parent of a 4 year old and a 1 year old and feel a great deal of responsibility already in every decision I make. In a way, I feel vindicated for some of my parenting decisions, but on the other - ergh. As well as being a child of the 80's and a female, I have to deal with my own subconscious influences and programing. AND I'm a teacher of iGen kids. I feel like Atlas with the weight of the future on my shoulders. Hey, that seems like a good subject for some art making....

My artwork

OKay, this is pathetic. I knew I didn't have a whole lot of time to be my creative self and that most of my work revolved around the classroom and arts n crafts with my son, but scrolling through my photos, it looks like I haven't even taken photos of anything I've done in the past year!
All my photos are of stuff like this:

Mummy Pie

Four Leaf Clover Pancakes

Minnie Mouse Pancakes

Easter Lemon Pistachio Cake

Declan's Race Car Cake

Um, I guess I like to eat! 

But I did manage to find some shots of things from school: 

This was an exercise in finding images in unexpected places.
Each student got a postcard size piece of map and drew on top of it. 

Birdhouse for Friends of Children Raffle

T-shirt design for our Department, we're the spARTans.
(Speaking of mash-ups and remixes - can you tell its after Warhol & Basquiat? And DaVinci too.)

       

Student Artworks: Self-Portraits

So while I am thinking about it, here are four of my students' self-portraits from last year. It was one of their final projects in my Intro to Art class. Students took expressive photos (and tried out expressive lighting) of themselves and each other, selecting one and their choice of art medium to create a self-portrait. They turned out fairly well and here are some of the best ones. They range in size from 12" x 18" to 18" x 24". 

"Robbie"

18" x 24"

Jelly Beans

"Madison"

18" x 24"

Acrylic & Tempera

"Ethan"

12" x 18"

Colored Pencil

"Paige"

12" x 18"

Watercolor Pencil

iGen Talk

So interesting thing happened today... I was discussing this year's crop of students with another art teacher in my building and we started talking about our current PD and the idea of increasing rigor and relevance and teaching to the type of students we have in reality(& by extension their use of technology). And it started out the same, the small gripes about administrators don't know / don't appreciate the way art is taught, etc, etc. and that if we are always bouncing from one thing to another (this was from something that was said about the igen's short attention span and inability to pay attention for more than 10 min) we won't be able to teach the valuable skill of focus and seeing. And how that is important to artists' abilities.
For me this conversation reminded me about how I used to feel about the differences between myself and my students. I remember coming straight out of college and realizing how elevated my vocabulary had become. I had to scale way back so that my students were able to understand any sort of discussion. And when we did work in the library (I also helped tutor kids), they were soooo lazy. I couldn't get them to walk over to the shelf to look something up in an encyclopedia, they just wanted to find it on a computer (keep in mind this was 2001 and BG - before google. it was even before Ask Jeeves, one of my personal favorite early search engines). But slowly my attitudes changed. As technology became more available and more widely used, I embraced it. But only for personal use. It was easy to compartmentalize for me because that was the way I had already known school. Then, eventually, I came to accept it as an educational tool. As I transitioned from overhead to led projector, desk top to laptop, disk to jump drive to cloud. How far I've come in really only a little more than 10 years. Its incredible! But I digress...
What I keep thinking about tonight is the comment my colleague made about students wanting to jump to google to look something up instead of just sitting and thinking about it for a while. "How lazy they are!" he said. To which I replied, "But are they? We stop to just think because that's an experience we are familiar with - - where that was the only option as we sat in class.  But to our current class of students, it has never been an option to be without google as a solution. Wouldn't we admonish our students if they couldn't problem solve? If that is a real solution, why shouldn't they think of it immediately? Why do we value immediate recall over this ability to problem solve or identify, evaluate, and use resources? For me its just a matter adjusting what we prioritize and value. When we were in school, no one would have chastised us for getting up to use a dictionary or encyclopedia. Then and now, teachers would encourage it. No one would call us lazy for daring to look up something we didn't know in a book. Why do that with a digital, web based resource like google?"
Just something I've been musing on...