I Hear-by Declare you a Digital Citizen!

https://giphy.com/embed/GpyS1lJXJYupG

via GIPHY 

To be honest when I read what this post was about I couldn’t help but smile and laugh to myself as a remembered and reflected on a time I attempted to teach digital citizenship.  Some might be wondering what happened? Was it a smashing success? Did it blow up in my face? But have patience I will explain to you the story of the time I taught how to be a digital citizen without digital.

In my per-internship I was placed in a lovely grade 4 classroom with a great coop and good kids.  Everything was going great as I was trucking along, week after week my coop would give me a topic or outcome and I would deliver what  I thought to be the greatest lesson  I could muster.  A time came when I received the following outcome:

Outcome: USC4.4

Determine basic personal responsibility for safety and protection in various environments/situations.   

She requested I teach a lesson on digital citizenship, and thus I took off looking for fantastic resources and create ways I could use technology to teach about being safe when using technology.  I was so intent on creating a good lesson I even made a facebook status asking for help.

Both teachers who commented suggestions were very helpful and gave me great options! I was so excited to do my lesson and have all my students be amazed at this great lesson using the chomebooks where they got the play a game but actually learn about cyber safety ( this was a time when I thought the best way to teach anything was through a game, I have since changed my ways) I was full steam ahead until I texted my lovely coop to ask how many chomebooks we could use when she informed me there are none, that the waiting list was at least a month long.  I thought minor setback, I’ll use one of the moving SMART boards.  Ah, alas that too was booked a month in advance.  Now I had to create a lesson on cyber safety with no cyber.

I have included my lesson plan just so you can see what I did end up doing but I will give you the forewarning it was not a great lesson and I mostly just learned that they knew more about technology then I did and the app musically was quite huge and in my option quite unsafe.  (look it up, very weird premises)

But hind sight is 20/20 and this failure of a lesson taught me something about challenges. Assess to technology still remains a huge obstacle in many classrooms.  I learned it is hard to teach about something without being able to physically show, or model what you want them to do.  So it is with this mindset I move forward toward my own classroom and my own incorporation of technology.  I see how much it is being used by students and how unsafe some of their practices are and I see the absolute need to model and teach positive digital citizenship but I also know that access to technology can be limited and sometimes you need to get a bit creative in your approach but it should still always be taught.

grade 4 health lesson pre internship – Full disclosure this is not a great lesson plan and nothing like the lessons I create today, but we all have to start somewhere!