And the Winners Are...

Digital Citizenship Media Contest Winners

Last month, just before the holiday break, students submitted digital posters, stories, and videos for this year's Digital Citizenship Media Contest. We were very impressed with all of the creativity and innovation that all of the participants displayed. It was not an easy decision, but here are this year's winners:

Our TK-2nd grade winner is Diya from Ms. Nguyen-Ebadi's 2nd grade class. Her class, at Noddin Elementary, used StoryBird and Make Belief Comix to write stories based on what they learned about staying safe online. Read Internet Safety to learn about how Stitch Bunny teaches his friends about password protection, email safety, and kid-appropriate websites. Diya uses StoryBird's stunning artwork to tell her digital citizenship tale in a clever way.

The 3-5 winners from Ms. Landis's 5th grade, Guadalupe Elementary class are Shannon and Lexi. We were truly impressed with their Harry Potter inspired story that was created using Scratch coding. Watch the video to find out how Harry deals with cyberbullies at Hogwarts. It is a great example of how STEAM can be used in language arts.

View HyperDoc

The middle school winners are from Ms. Zangwill's 7th and 8th grade technology class at Union Middle School. In the digital graphics category, Summer created a Piktochart infographic that sums up the most important points about digital citizenship in a visually stunning way. Adriana and Angelina won the award for best video with their interesting use of text, visuals and music to convey a powerful digital citizenship message using WeVideo. Finally, in the published story category, Sahith did an amazing job creating a Google Slides Choose Your Own Adventure story where you, the reader, have multiple decisions to make, leading to a different outcomes based on your choices.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this year's Digital Media Contest! If you missed it this year, but would like to try out some of these digital storytelling tools with your students, check out the Digital Storytelling Hyperdoc to get your students creating!

Hour of Code Winner

Congratulations to this year's Hour of Code winner, Danielle Blomseth, kindergarten teacher at Oster Elementary! This year our STEAM ToSAs did an outstanding job encouraging more teachers and students to participate than ever before. It is so exciting to see how teachers are finding cross-curricular integration of coding into their classrooms. Keep up the great work and if you haven't started coding with your class yet, it's never too late to start!

Digital Citizenship Week & New Media Contest

It's digital citizenship week! In a 1:1 classroom environment and a technology-driven world, we must not only raise good digital citizens, we should be cultivating digital leaders. Teaching digital citizenship shouldn't be a box that we check off of our list of things to do every year. Even though we do have many Common Sense Digital Citizenship lessons available to all teachers. Digital Citizenship is taught when we model proper use of technology and when we show students that we use search tools and the Creative Commons to give credit to creators of images and media that we use in the classroom. 

Have you ever had a student come across an inappropriate image while completing an assignment?

What would you do in this situation?

Although our district has Safe Search turned on, our filters will not catch every inappropriate image when doing a search. If this ever happens in your classroom, use it as a great teachable moment. Start a conversation with your class. Have them come up with a solution in a way that doesn't draw attention to the inappropriate image. Here are some possible answers:

1. Don't draw attention by laughing, pointing or calling friends over to see the image.
2. Click out of the screen and tell an adult. 
• The adult can warn the tech department and can quickly address the class, if needed.
3. Students won't get in trouble if they follow this safe digital practice in the classroom.

How could you avoid this situation?

It is understandable that nothing is 100% predictable when it comes searching the Internet for images. If you are doing something like a vocabulary lesson with your students, before starting the lesson, preview the vocabulary words while keeping in mind multiple meanings that may cause an inappropriate image or topic to come up. 

Click HERE for working links.

Digital Citizenship Digital Media Contest

In the spirit of Digital Citizenship week, here is a Digital Citizenship HyperDoc full of all kinds of projects and activities that your students can try. Last year we had a contest where students submitted their video projects. This year we have created a contest with 3 categories:

1. Digital Graphics
2. Digital Writing
3. Digital Recording

Hopefully we've included at least 1 project that every classroom can try. If you need any ideas or help getting started with a digital lesson, please contact Mary Fran, Sandy or Genevieve. We would love to help out!

Projects are due Friday, November 18, 2016 and students can submit their work by filling out the Official Entry Form.

If you are looking for resources to share with parents, here are ones that we recommend:

• Common Sense Media Parent Concerns
• My Digital Tat2 Resources  

Click HERE for working links.

4 Easy Low-Tech Digital Citizenship Projects

Don't forget that the November 13th Digital Citizenship Video Contest deadline is quickly approaching. The good news is that it's not too late to encourage your students to participate. We've come up with 4 simple low-tech project ideas with suggestions about how to turn those creations into videos:

1. Write a poem
2. Create a poster
3. Write a song or rap
4. Create a comic

Here's a Digital Citizenship HyperDoc with examples and how-to videos that can help get you started. You'd be surprised how easy it is to turn these projects into short videos.

Once you have your students complete a project, you may like help creating videos. The Tech ToSAs are available! Please fill out the 2 question Digital Citizenship Video Lesson Sign-Up and one of us will contact you to coordinate the lesson.

If you have any questions, you can always email any one of us: Genevieve, Nicole, or Mary Fran. 

Don't forget to turn the videos into the Official Entry Form by November 13th. We can't wait so see all of your students' creative digital citizenship projects!

*If you are having your students create their own videos for the contest, here are some digital story video templates to help them plan a script before creating the video.