Integrating Digital Citizenship into Social Studies Classes

EDTC6433

ISTE Standard 4

My triggering question was “How can I integrate digital citizenship into my social studies classes?”

A couple of weeks ago, we had a “Future Ready Day” at our school.  We had invited community members to come into our school to talk about their jobs.   We were short a few spots, so it was decided that we would fill it in the blank spot with a presentation about digital citizenship.  Since I am on our district’s Tech Summit committee I was asked if I would be willing to present.  The slide presentation had been prepared by our secondary technology coach so we just needed to present it to the 6th graders.  It focused on how fast and easy technology has made life for our students and even though it is really cool and helpful, it has pitfalls and students need to be aware of those.  It was so well received by our students that we plan on including it in the future.

Between making this presentation and my research for ITSE 4, I was reminded that we need to continually educate our students how to be digital citizens in this global world.  Since we do research in our social studies class it seems like a logical place for us to talk about “safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources”.

As we realized our ancient Asian culture project need to some major tweaking, we split up the work between the 7th grade social studies teachers.    My job was to work on the rubric for the projects to make sure it was teacher and student friendly and included everything we expected the students to have.   While working on it,   I advocated for requiring that students create a bibliography and as you can see in rubric below we have done that.

This last couple weeks, to help our students be successful with this project, we have been modeling the projects with our current unit on Imperial China.  As we have been modeling the projects, we have showing students how to create a bibliography and cite information correctly.  This has become so easy and fast for students to do with technology.  I use http://www.citationmachine.net/

while others are using http://www.easybib.com/   Although, not perfect, they are a start.  I have also been showing students where to find citation information on the discovery education and online encyclopedia our district subscribes to.  I show them how to copy and paste that information into a google doc and create a bibliography.  With how easy and fast it is to create citations, there really is no excuse not to give credit to others work.

We also talk about “safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology” when students are looking for pictures.  Unfortunately, people can tag their pictures however they wish, and sometimes they tag them so inappropriate images will come up when students are searching for images for their projects.  We have taught our students that if this happens they need to close their computer and let an adult know.  They have learned this throughout their time in our district so luckily it has become second nature for them.  

We use to have our students get their pictures off of flicker.com because they could sort them and only have creative common pictures, but then they started require an email.  Our students are too young to have an email,  so this wasn’t an option any more.  Then we found that they could get pictures by searching on  https://search.creativecommons.org,  but would often just do a google search.  This past week in our hangout as well as in the article The Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons we learned about http://www.photosforclass.com where students could look for appropriate creative common pictures that have also been screened for appropriateness.  On top of that when they download them into the presentations it automatically puts a citation on them. This is a great resource that  I plan on using this as we go forward with this and other projects.  

I think that it is important that we take the opportunities that present themselves to teach our students to be good digital citizens throughout our lessons or conversations we have.  As can be seen I do have the opportunity to teach my students to be good digital citizens by teaching my students the “three pillars” of respect, educate and protect (REP) that I read about in the article, Middle School Digital Citizenship:  What Students Need to Know and Why while “advocating, modeling and teaching safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources” while working on research projects.

Although, I have been focusing on just one portion of ISTE 4, I have been thinking about how we are can incorporate the other parts of ISTE 4 into my socials studies classroom.

First, by doing this project with all of our 7th grade students we are also addressing the issue of providing equitable access to technology to all students that Erin Cook focused on with her article, 5 Ways to Make Technology More Accessible to More Students.  Since being equitable does not mean equal, we also are trying to find resources that are on multiple grade levels or can be read to the students so that all students can be successful.

Secondly, we have the opportunity in our social studies classes to “promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information” through teaching our students to peer editing skills.   This is perfect moment to teach students to THINK ( is it True?,   is it Helpful?, is it Inspiring?, Is it Necessary?, and is it Kind?) before they make a comment or post.   Many materials are available from https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship to help teach these skills.  

Lastly,  although I haven’t been good about doing this,  as teachers we can “ develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital age communication and collaboration”.  I thought of the idea of following twitter feeds that was shown during our hangout session showed a fast and easy way for us to do this.

Miller, J. (2016, March 24). 5 Ways to make technology more accessible to more students -.

Retrieved November 18, 2017, from

https://www.teachthought.com/technology/5-ways-make-technology-accessible-students/

Watanbee-Crockett, L., Middle school digital citizenship: What students need to know and why. (2016,

December 08). Retrieved November 15, 2017, from

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/middle-school-digital-citizenship

Walters, S. & Burt, R.,  (2017, August 08). The educator’s guide to copyright, fair use, and creative

commons. Retrieved November 19, 2017, from

https://www.theedublogger.com/2017/01/20/copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/

ISTE Standard 3 -- Modeling and Faciliating the Incorporation of Current and Emerging Digitals Tools into the Classroom.

Modeling and Facilitating the Incorporation of Current and Emerging Digital Tools into the Classroom to Prepare Students for the Future

EDTC 6433

ISTE Standard 3

Triggering Question:  Since we live in a global and digital society, how can I model and facilitate the incorporation of current and emerging digital tools into our social studies curriculum?

I picked this question because in our school district our social studies department is often asked to try out digital tools in our classes.  This practice began because social studies is the only department that doesn’t have state testing scores directly attached to teachers, therefore we had more flexibility in how we presented the material.  Also, since all students take a social studies class it provides an opportunity for all students to learn and use digital tools that are available.   

Another reason, this question came to my mind is due to our upcoming research project in 7th grade social studies and I am a digital immigrant.  This is a new research project for all of us and we are providing choices.  One of the choices is how the final project will be presented.  Student will be given the choice of using technology or with paper or pencil.  This has caused us to research digital tools that are available for our students to use and how we are going to model this tools since some are new to us as well.

Exploration

As I was reading through the assigned articles, I couldn’t help but think that they were geared more toward digital natives and I am a digital immigrant.  I also realized how many digital tools I do use in my daily life in the classroom and it is much more than what I do in my personal life which is the opposite of what it said about digital native teachers.

The article “Cross-Reference of Online Teaching”  confirmed the belief of why we teach digital tools is to help our students  “become more marketable for the careers they will be competing of in the future, many of which are yet to be created”(p. 22).  In social studies our main goal is to teach our students how to research, evaluate resources, and draw conclusions, not necessarily the content, so they can transfer those skills to what they will be doing in the future. So by incorporating the teaching of current and emerging tools, we are also providing opportunities for them to learn digital tools that hopefully they will be able to use in their future learning and careers.

As I looked for articles to help me incorporate digital tools into my classroom,  I found an article entitled “Five Tips for Incorporating New Technology in the Classroom” which provided discussed using our  best teaching practices when teaching other educators about using technology.  I believe we can use those same best practices to teach students how to use technology.  For example, we need to remember that our students come with different backgrounds and knowledge in regard to technology, so having them work with a group of mixed abilities is good for all students.  Those who need extra help can get it readily from those in the group and those who provide the help deepen their knowledge.  We also need to provide ongoing opportunities for students to use the digital tools we have taught so they can deepen their learning and see how their learning can be transferred to other subjects and therefore to their future choices.  And, most importantly, we need to provide a culture in our classrooms where it is okay to take risks and make mistakes, since we learn from these experiences.

Although I liked the checklist provided in the chapter entitled “Explorating the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Elementary and Secondary Teachers” provided, it made me wonder what does this look like and sound like in the classroom.   While looking for my answer I found another article called, “Know the ISTE Standards . T3: Model Digital Age Learning”.  I thought it did a good job of giving concrete examples of how technology can be used to teach students digital tools and citizenship while aligning with the standards.  The chart below shows how we can apply this in our upcoming unit on SE Asian cultures as we model looking for images that show events or innovations that affected the way people lived the students culture of choice:

ITSE STANDARD	How it will be modeled by teachers
Model digital age work and learning. Teachers exhibit knowledge, skills and work processes representative of an innovative professional in a global and digital society.	The teacher models a presentation and annotated time line that shows the how life was affected in Imperial China by events and innovations.  Next, the teacher models a web search to select an image, then demonstrates how to use a digital drawing program to practice layering and overlay. Students conduct their own web searches to select a series of images, then use the digital tool to create one image from the series of layered images.  The students then post the images for their culture onto their presentation or annotated timeline
A. Demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.	The teacher provides examples of digital artwork and shows how it can replicated in their presentation or annotated timeline
b. Collaborate with students, peers, parents and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.	The students share their work by pasting a URL into a google doc for peer sharing and critiquing.
C.  Communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents and peers using a variety of digital age media and formats.	Both the teacher and the students use google classroom and google docs  to communicate and share.
D.  Model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate and use information resources to support research and learning.	The teacher models appropriate web searching skills and proper use of copyrighted imagery/information.  Teachers will be providing an ongoing bibliography.  Students are required to provide a bibliography and will be working on this as they research their culture of choice.

The article that Erin Cook shared, “What Digital Literacy Looks Like in Classroom”, also gave some resources to teach digital citizenship that I look forward to incorporating more as I model how to appropriately use and cite resources with my students during this project.   Although, I teach a digital citizenship at the beginning of the year, this article along with the one I found reminded me how important just like with other things we teach that we need to continue to provide this education throughout the year.

REFLECTION

Although, I have gathered resources to facilitating and model the incorporation of digital tools into our social studies curriculum, I need to continue to gather digital tools to be used in the classroom.  Some of the new tools I have heard about through discussions in our class  and the edcamp conference this weekend that I want to learn more about and hopefully incorporate are padlet.com, book creator, menti.com, and google addons.  I also plan on looking on freetech4teachers website that Professor Wicks referenced in the hangout this week.  My exploration also has reminded me that my goal as a teacher is to give my students the tools they need to be future ready and successful in their future.

References

Crowley, B. (2016, April 29). What digital literacy looks like in a classroom. Retrieved November 05,

2017, from https://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2014/10/29/ctq_crowley_digitalliteracy.html

Crompton, H. (n.d.). Know the ISTE standards•T 3: Model digital age learning. Retrieved November
05, 2017, from https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=109

Kennadee, K. (n.d.). Cross-Reference of online teaching. In Distance Learning (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp.

21-28).

Stanfield, S. (2013). Five tips for incorporating new technology in the classroom. Learning & Leading

With Technology, 41(4), 34-35.

Wen, J., & Shih, W. (n.d.). Explorating the information literacy competency standards for elementary

and secondary teachers. In Computers and Education (pp. 787 - 806).