EDTC 6037 - Team Blog

  How can digital literacy be integrated in Math, Science, and/or Healthful Living classrooms to show teachers' digital competencies and to address ISTE standards for Educators?  I believe the best way to teach digital literacy is to integrate it into the curriculum. Have students use websites, social media accounts, etc to complete assignments and discuss the importance of the way that they use the platform. For example, for math they math be asked to research data and use it to create a graph. In this example you can discuss with students creditable sources and what sites not to use. For healthful living, they may be discussing the importance of exercise. Lots of students are currently into Tiktok, have students create Tiktok videos as PSA's for importance of exercise. In this example you can discuss the importance of privacy and appropriate things to do on videos on social media platforms. For Science, students may have to do research on a topic and be required to create an...

Professional Development I originally had planned to create a flipped classroom PD in a hybrid style, with parts of the PD being online/asynchronous & parts of the PD being in-person discussions/workshops. However, with the pandemic & the sudden change to focusing on remote learning, there was no way that teachers or the administration would be willing for me to do such a PD. Most of the teachers were focused on getting stuff to their students/adjusting to the new paradigm of working from home, and I was swamped as a tech facilitator with making sure that students had devices and internet connections in order to do work. Instead of doing a PD on a flipped classroom, I instead moved my PD to a more generalized plan of supporting teachers based on their individual classroom needs and activities. For example, I assisted the atheletic trainers with the basics of Canvas & helped them with transitioning what would be activities directly observed by the coaches to activities tha...

How can we promote digital literacy in math, science, and healthful living classsrooms A good way to promote digital literacy/digital citizenship in math, science, and healthful living classrooms is to have students make infographics using Canva or another similar tool to tell a story with the data that they have collected. For example, a health classroom could collect data on the impact of having a healthy life through nutrition and exercise and gather data from valid sources, and then create an infographic showing the impact through their quantative data. With this, we teach students digital literacy in many ways -- creating a computational artifact with computational tools like Canva, Adobe Spark, etc; searching for reputable sources of information and making sure that the information is correct; making sure that students understand the underlying data when it comes to a study (or in essence, when a article starts with "studies show..." what does that mean?); and teac...

Hyperdocs was the professional development that I had planned for my PD implementation.  My goal was to present this PD during the teachers' already scheduled PLC time.  I usually offer professional development to them once a month.  We were going to increase those times to bi-monthly for this PD. I wanted to do it during PLC times rather than after school based on my reading from the text of Hew and Brush that stated that a lack of time was one of the most significant factors that teachers face.  By having them to complete this during that time, I was able to preserve their after school time, and I had hoped that teachers would be more willing to learn and excited.  I was only going to provide the PD to the second-grade teachers.  I had picked them because our K-2 school will be transitioning to Chromebooks, and I wanted to use them as the digital leaders in the school the following year. When COVID19 closed, our schools and teachers were scrambling to c...

According to the NC Digital Learning Competencies for teachers, teachers will model and teach digital citizenship by the ethical, respectful, and safe use of digital tools and resources that support the creation of positive digital school culture.  It is my belief one of the best ways to teach digital citizenship is to integrate into the curriculum.  Rather than telling the students a list of rules that they are not allowed to do, have them use online tools and teach the correct way to interact on social media. Book Snaps are very popular in the English Language Arts class, but this year I presented teachers with content snaps.  Students can snap pictures of completed math problems and snap them.  This leads to a discussion on what is appropriate to take photos of and share on snap chat.  Also, it leads to having conversations about who is the audience of your social media accounts. In Science, students are often completing research projects.  Having ...

What did you do and learn from your PD activities? How did you utilize the learning materials from this course to support your PD development and delivery? I originally planned on doing a five week course where each week we would learn about a new website or tool that we could then use in our classrooms right away. I had talked to some of the teachers in my school and asked them what they wanted to learn in terms of technology integration and they all said new tools. I had set up our professional development as a course in Canvas which is the platform we use with our kids. A few teachers wanted to see and use it as a student. I spoke with my instructional coach and she was able to help me work it out so everyone who participated could one 1 Digital CEU! The plan was to meet every Thursday from 8-9 where I would introduce the tool and we would work through some activities together. Then the teachers would have various assignments to complete that week and use the tool in their classr...

How can digital literacy be integrated into classrooms? Digital Literacy can be integrated into any class if the teacher is using technology. Any time we are technology in our classrooms, we need to ensure that the students are using it properly and being safe in the virtual world. Being a good digital citizen is something that needs to be taught just life manners in real life. According to the powerpoint this week, teachers need to model what it looks like to be a good digital citizen. One thing I have been doing is using Flipgrid in our virtual learning to help give students the chance to collaborate. Each student was given a math question to work out and explain the steps to the class. Other students can then leave comments or ask other questions. This ties in with the ISTE standard from the powerpoint of "Create experiences for learners to make positive, socially responsible contributions and exhibit empathetic behavior online that build relationships and community". ...