- Why Trust Matters: It never fails- every time I use a shared padlet, Pear Deck, or Google Slides for collaboration in my classroom, I will have at least one student who starts a chat box or "contributes" a slide full of memes. Once the "conversation" gets started, other students can't resist chiming in. Similarly, for every thirty students who spend their research time investigating appropriate content, there are about five students who will squander their work minutes challenging each other in gaming sites. What needs to be in place is a conversation about what one stands to gain (a laugh, brief entertainment), and what one stands to lose (individual or class-wide trust, grades, learning) when making these choices. This is an easy topic to make personal because it happens frequently, in all my classes. Without naming names, I'd ask students to think of times when this has occurred. I'd also ask them if it's usually the same students starting the off-task behavior (again, without naming names). Then we'd share out: What was gained in the situation? What was lost? Do the gains outweigh the losses? Also, next steps should be discussed about what to do when someone else starts the chat box or the meme-ing: how do you shut it down without becoming part of the problem? KQED's Mind/Shift has a great article about the need for trust in tech-integrated schools.
- Copy & Paste Culture: As I mentioned earlier, copied & pasted information is ubiquitous in my students' writing. Not all of students are trying to plagiarize; in fact, most of my eighth graders are skilled at tacking on the phrase, according to website x, . However, this comes at the expense of students actually comprehending what they read and including any of their own writing, well- in their own writing. Common Sense Media does a nice job making this subject relevant to teens in their Digital Bytes program, "Copy-Paste Culture". Rather than droning on (as I do) about the importance of including paraphrase and commentary in research papers, "Copy-Paste Culture" takes a look at music sampling and Disney re-dos. This could be a solid starting point for getting students to take a look at the music remixes or Disney cartoons featured and say (as I do), "Hey, that's not yours!" Though the Bytes program does not end with a prescription of how to avoid copying other people's work, it might bring a new perspective to the conversation about how many of students' words actually need to be their own. This could also be followed later by a discussion about copyright and reuse permissions, and how to utilize sites like creativecomons.org.
- Fake News Makes You Look Dumb: I'll admit, it's a bit of a jab- but nothing is more personal with my students than their own reputation. And when they share "news" or "facts" that aren't real, it makes them look silly. For my purposes, I want students to be critical of the websites they use for research, and to be able to ferret out those that are unreliable or absolutely fake. Believing fake news puts one at the receiving end of digital communication, but re-tweeting or citing it as fact puts one on the other side. In either case, I want my students to be smart about what they're seeing online. To that end, I've developed a lesson plan to teach students how to recognize some of the "red flags" of fake news. Thanks to some materials from Common Sense Media, the plan gives students a 30-point scorecard for evaluating websites. Though much of the material in my lesson plan can be applied student research, it's stronger when made personal: when you promote fake news, it makes you look bad. The plan includes a look at websites claiming "news" my students have talked about in class, because they had heard about it from friends. My favorite is this one about the world's biggest Starbucks.
My 8th grade students are natives to the world of Instagram, Kik, and YouTube. After three years in an technology-integrated school, they also have experience in the benefits and pitfalls of using devices- many of them shared- for function rather than entertainment. Furthermore, when they walk into my classroom they are entering the world of Common Core ELA: the phrase "cite textual evidence" looms over them in nearly every activity we do. Thus, they constantly tread through the murky waters of copy & paste, well-chosen evidence, and downright plagiarism. My ELA team, in recent years, has been searching for a straightforward way to teach our students how to identify reliable websites and appropriately paraphrase or quote different authors. Nevertheless, many students' writing continues to be filled with copy & paste and poorly evaluated research- some, out of lack of understanding; others, but for many, it stems from a desire to shortcut their way out of actual reading and writing. Though adolescents need to understand digital citizenship inside and outside the classroom, as an ELA teacher, my focus here will be on digital citizenship (and digital communication) as it pertains to academics.
2 Comments
Joe Hall
2/11/2017 04:00:58 pm
Kelley,
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Todd
2/13/2017 08:35:14 pm
Kelley,
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AuthorMy job is to convince 13 year-olds read books and write essays. I want them to do so with joy and confidence, and without launching spitballs at their neighbor. Archives
June 2017
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