As a result, I have been building a variety of Virtual Exploration Rooms around content topics. These rooms allow me to easily share materials with teachers that they can share with their students in an engaging format. Students have a variety of resources presented to them in these rooms and they also empower choice in their learning. Take a look at some of the rooms below to see (or use - they are all available FREEELY!) or even step into the Relaxation Room to just simply engage in some mindfullness and relaxation.
Recently, I have been exploring different ways to engage students in content. There are many tools and strategies available, but sometimes something new or even a different way of presenting a variety of resources for students to explore is just what teachers need.
As a result, I have been building a variety of Virtual Exploration Rooms around content topics. These rooms allow me to easily share materials with teachers that they can share with their students in an engaging format. Students have a variety of resources presented to them in these rooms and they also empower choice in their learning. Take a look at some of the rooms below to see (or use - they are all available FREEELY!) or even step into the Relaxation Room to just simply engage in some mindfullness and relaxation.
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This school year has started out unlike any other, so I felt that it was essential for my 3-5 STEAM students to start with a solid foundation that will influence their choices beyond STEAM class - Digital Citizenship. Digital Citizenship is not something that most students get excited about learning, and can be equally as exciting for teachers if the context is not right. I knew that Common Sense Media had a Digital Citizenship Curriculum, with a plethora of solid content. But being honest, the presentation was not something that truly grabbed my interest. If it didn't grab my interest, I knew for a fact it would not grab my students' interest as well. I knew I had to come up with a way to make it fun, engaging, and something that they would remember.
Enter Digital Citizenship Shark Week. Well, actually for me it was Digital Citizenship Shark WEEKS. We are doing two week Specials rotations at my school, so I took advantage of the shark theme and turned it into a unit that also incorporated STEAM lessons. I knew my students didn't want to have Digital Citizenship content thrown at them everyday for a week, and it personally didn't get me excited about teaching. But mix the Digital Citizenship with STEAM activities and I am definitely excited!
I decided to alternate days with Digital Citizenship lessons with STEAM activities. We started off with a STEAM activity to kick off the unit and alternated days with Digital Citizenship after that. The two Fridays of our two-week rotation were "Fun Fridays" where we worked on keyboarding skills and reviewing the topics of the week with different activities on a choice board. It was so great to hear the conversations on those Fridays! Students thought it was all fun, but the conversations I heard around the rooms were still on target with content and applying what they had learned. It made for a Fun Friday for me! Feel free to check out any of the lessons and resources below or use the Bitmoji Classroom above!
That is a wrap on our Digital Citizenship Shark Week (even though it was actually two weeks long)! I have to say, I am so glad that I poured a lot of my creativity into this unit and made Digital Citizenship something that students will connect with a fun theme. I absolutely love the Common Sense Media's Digital Citizenship Curriculum, but I knew deep down that the simplicity of the presentation would not be something that would engage my students. This is not about students needing to be entertained 24/7, it is about presenting content in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them. Sharks were definitely the way to go! We were able to read several stories with sharks, connect them to our content, and even work in STEAM and Computer Science concepts into our activities. It was so much more than sharks and Digital Citizenship - it was a culturally responsive approach to teaching! For our last day, we had our second Fun Friday choice board. I offered Nitro Type and STEAM websites again, but had seven new options for them to choose from. Be Internet Awesome has become a quick favorite among students. It is always interesting to me to see where students gravitate towards and their unique personalities that come out when they are given choice. This school year is so different that what they have experienced in the past and although we are distanced, masked, and not able to share resources, we can still find different ways to learn and have fun along the way. Is absolutely exhausting for the teacher? 100%! It is also 100% worth it to see the ah-ha moments and excitement among students!
For our last Digital Citizenship lesson, I wanted to end with one of the most important topics that all students should be aware of - cyberbullying. We read the story about Clark the Shark and talked about how certain characters in the story were up-standers or bystanders. I feel that students may not always understand that their actions are not always considered to be a "joke" and that they can truly hurt the feelings of others when they are online. We had some great discussions about bullying in person and cyberbullying online.
For our activity for this lesson, we connected the idea that Clark had in the book to make rhymes to remember things with what we know about being a good digital citizen as well as cyberbullying. We used the website Typatone to write rhymes that help us remember those things and turn them into music. This was way more impactful than I originally thought it would be! Students started writing poems and short stories about what we had learned and liked sharing it with their classmates. It was so much more than the novelty of putting in characters and hearing what they sounded like - there was so much meaning behind it!
For our last STEAM activity for the Digital Citizenship Shark Week unit, I wanted to tap into their creative side as well as do something that would benefit a local non-profit, Kids' Food Basket. So, for our last STEAM activity, we decorated sack supper bags for Kids' Food Basket with a shark and Digital Citizenship theme! As this was at the end of our unit, I wanted to give students the opportunity to not only show what they know, but have an authentic audience for their work. Whenever I have done bag decorating, the biggest obstacle I run into is that students do not want to give up their bags when they are done. They have invested their time and talents into creating something that they are so proud of that they do not want to give it away. This is where I reminded them of our lesson where we spoke about empathy and how how our actions may affect (positively or negatively) others. In this case, it is an opportunity to have a positive impact! I felt that in our two week Special rotation, we had covered a lot of information and it might be hard to ask the students to recall from memory facts and information we had covered. I created a double-sided "cheat sheet" that had shark facts we learned about on one side and Digital Citizenship facts we learned about on the other side. It was a great way for students to connect facts with their own drawings to create something amazing! I created a couple of bags to show students different ways they could decorate their bags (front and back) as well as possible ways to incorporate the shark and Digital Citizenship facts.
For our third Digital Citizenship lesson, we explored Digital Literacy and Communication. I think out of all of the shark Digital Citizenship lessons that I taught, this one was probably my favorite. We started off with the story, How to Make a Shark Smile, and then discussed appropriate ways that we can interact (responding, sharing, working, and playing) with others when online. With all of our lessons, I have stressed that Digital Citizenship is being our best self at all times - online or offline.
The students were fascinated with the concept of altering images and trying to guess if an image or video was altered. Of the two media pieces I showed them (one picture and one video), the majority of students fully believed that the video was real. It was a great way to show them the concept of altering as it fit with our shark theme. It prompted great discussion and often heated arguments (as much as the built-in quiz/check-ins that I put in the presentation!). I love how animated the students became when they were fully engaged in the topic.
For our activity for this lesson, I introduced the concept of coding. We connected the characters with our story with our Digital Citizenship concepts to code a path from a starting point to an ending point. The kids thought this was super fun, enjoyed completing the scenarios I presented them as well as creating their own!
Our third STEAM activity once again had my students thinking like a scientist and engineer - but this time to learn more about Great White Sharks. Using the book, Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless, I introduced the importance of wanting to learn more about something you are passionate about, regardless of what anyone may think. I combined that with some facts from Great White Sharks (Nature's Children) to set the stage for what scientists already know about Great White Sharks. After listening to the story, we jumped into our STEAM activity. Our challenge was to create something new and innovative that would help scientists learn more about Great White Sharks. I told the students that they could not simply copy something that they know is already available (like a tracker attached to a shark), but they could use it as their starting point and turn it into what I call "the 50 million dollar idea" (if I gave them 50 million dollars to make their idea even better, unique, and something that will help others, I would give them the money on the spot). They could use LEGOs or their computer for research and prototyping. They came up with some great ideas and are on their way to being scientists and engineers with big ideas and dreams! Whew! We made it through our first week of our Digital Citizenship Shark Week! I am so happy that I designed this unit the way that I did for the two week Specials rotations we have at school. This will get each class started off with the same important information about digital citizenship, but it also works in so many STEAM elements. I am breaking up the digital citizenship lessons with a STEAM lesson in between. This has really helped the students stay engaged in the digital citizenship lessons as they know there are STEAM activities worked into those lessons as well as the lesson for the next day. So why not celebrate with a little Fun Friday?! This is where we put what we learned about personal and private information into practice by signing up for a Nitro Type account. We learned how to sign into an online service using our Google account, and then created our public racing name. We talked about how we don't want to use any private information for this name, as others will see it. After we did some racing, I mean typing practice, I gave them a Fun Friday Choice Board that had other shark and digital citizenship activities they could choose from. I was surprised at how many students simply wanted to keep on working on Nitro Type! It was fun as we learned how to add each other as friends and race against one another. Of course, they all wanted to race me and see if they could beat the teacher! They learned quickly that they need to practice some more, but will definitely be challenging me in the future. It was definitely a great way to spend our Friday as teaching and learning is absolutely draining on everyone right now - teachers and students!
Our second STEAM activity turned out to be even more interesting for students than I thought it would be! I shared with them that there are threats that sharks face every day in their daily lives of simply surviving (found in the book, Sharks: A 400 Million Year Journey). The students seemed so surprised as we had previously talked about how sharks are apex predators and there are not many other species that feed on them as prey. I introduced five (5) facts that sharks face - longlines, nets, shark finning, pollution, and habitat destruction. Some of these were new to students in that they hadn't thought they were something that affected sharks (nets, pollution, and habitat destruction) and some were new as they had not heard of them before (longlines and shark finning). I knew that the shark finning could potentially be a sensitive topic for students, but I was absolutely blow away by how seriously they took that particular threat to sharks and passionate about finding a solution to stopping it.
After discussing the different threats, I explained to the students that they would be working as scientists and engineers that day. We were going to use the Engineering Design Process to engineer a scientific solution to one of the threats that sharks face. I let each student choose the threat that they would like to explore further. They had opportunities to research more if they needed to, ask me any questions (we often researched together based on based on our conversations!), and have lots of creating, testing, improving, and sharing. We used LEGOs as our prototyping material (in the presentation I have digital Plus Plus blocks for my remote learners) and created so many cool things! Some of the solutions that students came up with:
Our second Digital Citizenship lesson was all about Safety and Security. We ready the story Friends Don't Eat Friends as our intro to our lesson. We determined that Shark did not actually eat Bob and that he was truly playing Hide and Go Seek at the end of Misunderstood Shark. For this lesson, I really wanted students to understand the difference between personal and private information and how some people will use clickbait to try and get people to click on links. Similar to that of our first lesson, much of the information I gathered was from Common Sense Media's Digital Citizenship Curriculum and I put a shark spin on it.
As many of my students haven't used Google Slides or some of the tools beyond basic text and inserting an image, I felt this Shark Shapegram activity would give them an opportunity to see the different tools available in Google Slides as well as how they can combine shapes to make a design. I feel my students definitely had a productive struggle with this activity and I am all for that! I keep on reminding them that in STEAM class, we do hard things because when we do hard things, our brain grows. I think we had some big brains after this class!
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