Activity 9: Fitness Assessment

This is a new assignment for Summer Camp - last year, we emphasized the importance of planning ahead when using Web 2.0 tools, but we didn't give concrete examples of what problems might crop up.  This assignment was created to help you get a step ahead of your students and take a proactive stance when dealing with internet misbehavior.

I'd argue that most of these hypothetical situations could easily be avoided by clearly outlining your expectations before students start using whatever tool you're sharing with them.  Our district has a generic permission slip for students to use online accounts, but you should be sure to share your plans with families in advance, giving them the choice to opt out (and letting them know how that impacts their student's learning, outlining the other ways their child can complete the work).  Your principal should also know ahead of time what you're doing and how it fits into your curriculum.

Besides having parent and principal support, you also need students to buy in.  They need to know what's expected of them and what the consequences are if they misbehave.  The consequences aren't necessarily just you preventing them from using the tool or restricting computer privileges - talk about their digital footprints and how impossible it is to take back something once it's posted online.

Scenarios 1, 3, and 7 are situations where students don't realize how their inappropriate conduct could haunt them later on.  In Scenario 1, students using Google Drive to peer review work are using the comments tool to insult each other.  We had elementary students figure out early on that they can use comments to chat with each other during work time, and that they could easily create a new document that wasn't shared with a teacher.  We had students call each other names and harass each other, but the only way teachers found out was if a student told us.  Those documents quickly spun out of control, since kids could easily share it with each other and even with students in other buildings.  We can't lock down the collaborative features; that's one of the strengths of Google Drive is having those features available.  Instead, we need to be clear upfront about our expectations and hold students accountable.

In Scenario 3, the teacher didn't want to create individual blog accounts for students, so she talked about acceptable use and let kids blog anonymously.  The students figured out pretty quickly that their comments couldn't be traced back to them, and they posted hurtful and inappropriate comments.  Creating accounts (and talking about the importance of not sharing passwords!) would have prevented this problem in the first place.  Scenario 7 is similar, since students used a class YouTube account to post screencasts.  However, students posted inappropriate videos instead and changed the privacy settings.  Videos that were meant to be viewed only by the class were publicly available, shared and commented on by the outside world.  This violated students' privacy, especially those without photo permission.  If students had their own accounts or had just shared their screencasts with the teacher, she could have posted them appropriately.  

There's no way we can stay a step ahead of our students with technology, no matter how tech-savvy we think we are.  They're the digital natives!  But we need to teach them about digital citizenship from an early age, think carefully about our online assignments, monitor their online work for our classes, and hold them accountable for their behavior.  Online tools blur the line between home and school, so we need families to help us, too.

Activity 8: Polling & Data Gathering

Teachers are masters of assessment; we need to know if students understand the concepts we've taught and we use a variety of methods to collect that information from them.  This activity introduces some Web 2.0 tools to help us with that.  Here's an informal assessment on Summer Camp and what you think of it so far:
I don't know about you, but I love Google Forms!  It's a great way to get feedback.  When you complete summer camp, I'll email you a survey about your camp experience.  In the meantime, I'm sharing one of the year-end surveys I gave my elementary students to help me plan for next year.

Activity 7: Cloud Computing

I use Google Drive all the time now - it's my preferred way to save documents at home and at school, especially since the documents can be shared and edited by multiple people at a time. Just the other day I was editing some essays for my brother. We were both making changes in the documents at the same time, so it was cool to watch his changes. We could even argue about them by adding comments!  Don't worry, I didn't choose those documents to share with you!  :)  Here's a school-related document:



I chose to share a Presentation I gave to Sunnyside staff in the fall. My principal had asked me to give an introduction to Google Drive for all staff. Everyone who came and listened to my presentation then logged in to create and share a document with me. I got everything from PLC meeting agendas to knock knock jokes!

Google Drive is a powerful way to share information, so I'm glad we use Google Apps for Education in our district. It's great for us as a staff, but it's even better that our students also have access.

Activity 6: Study Tools

Last year I created a Tagxedo and flashcards for this activity, so this summer I decided to try Spicynodes and Timetoast.

Here is my Spicynode showing all the cool options for your Summer Camp 2.0 projects!  Laying it out this way surprised me...I didn't realize just how many tools we've included!

For my TimeToast, I decided to create a sample timeline for a biography project.  Fifth grade does a wax museum project each year and creates a newspaper with a timeline.  I don't know that this would be used for that project, but it's another way to represent that timeline, or a fun way to integrate technology into the lesson.  I used Melvil Dewey for mine, since I'm a library nerd.  :)  My information came from the OCLC (http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/biography.en.html) and American National Biography Online (http://www.anb.org/articles/09/09-00229.html).

I think there must be a better timeline option out there; I 've used ReadWriteThink's student tool before and found that a lot easier to navigate.  One thing I didn't like about TimeToast is that I had to put specific dates, and I couldn't always find the dates in my research.  I chose January or July 1st if I didn't have a real date, so not all of these things happened on New Years!

Activities 4 & 5: Screencasting & MVYouTube

Okay, I cheated and combined my assignments to catch up!  But activities 4 & 5 go together like peanut butter and jelly.  I used Smart Recorder to create a screencast to show students and families how to access our Mackin VIA account, then transferred the video to YouTube so it would be easy to embed on our school website.  If I make more screencasts, I'll definitely use Smart Recorder.  I've tried the web-based options, but this is much simpler to use.  I've heard similar complaints from my campers this year, even though we've updated our directions after feedback from last summer.  Having my own YouTube channel is a great way to save not only my videos, but those that would be useful to share.  I like that you can turn off advertisements and annotations too - it takes some of the risk out of showing videos in school, since those ads can be quite shocking!  Anyway, here's my video: