Well, it has been a very busy couple of weeks with classes, school, keeping up on marking and preparing for Student Conferences next week. Anyway! The projects are coming along nicely!
I would say that my ECI834 Course Prototype is about 90% complete, with just a few things to add and tweak before the final submission in two weeks!
My ECI832 Digitial Citizenship resource is coming along. Right now, I am modelling it after the Prototype format from 834 and creating an online digital citizenship/literacy unit that I can use synchronously or asynchronously with my students present and future!
834 Science 8 Prototype has three modules, number one is complete and I am fine-tuning modules two and three as we speak! 832 will have four (maybe one more) modules with a few “sections” beneath each one. I have citizenship and literacy topics grouped into these sections with a small activity or larger
assignment attached to each. This unit could take up to a few months to complete, or work through at a quicker pace, depending on the classroom needs for scheduling. If I were to continue developing this unit, I would include refreshing activities to complete throughout the year (if we remember to come back, which we often forget to do!)
In the effort for our division to require digital citizenship to be taught in all classrooms, we actually have outcomes that have been added to the Practical and Applied Arts strand in Religion. So, for grades 7&8, we actually have outcomes to cover in this area of study.
“PAA 7.1 & 8.1: Explore elements of Digital Citizenship to understand how to navigate and participate in a digital world guided by faith”
Many students have been talking about having a course or specific outcomes from the Ministry and I completely agree that we should have something a little more streamlined from the government that makes digital citizenship a staple in teaching ELA or Health; it should no be up to individual divisions to incorporated those concepts and ideas into the curriculum.
What are your thoughts on including outcomes in the curriculum? Would that help you build content in your classroom, or should it be left to the teachers and school divisions to mandate Digital Citizenship/Literacy?
Dalton Danaher 
Dalton,
Great post! Another semester almost done… Keep going!
Yes! I absolutely agree that digital citizenship and media literacy should have more government support when it comes to teaching these topics. As important as it is, I feel like it is often put on the backburner or just left up to teachers to tackle on their own. There are great student/teacher resources out there to cover this, but it is difficult to emphasize its importance without it being explicitly stated in the curriculum/having more government direction and support.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
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Good on you Dalton! I finished up progress reports and SLC’s last week so now there is no excuse not to go hard at EC&I832!
Like you, I would like a little more direction from the Ministry with regards to incorporating digital citizenship into one or more curricula. Perhaps the next generation of educators, more tech savvy and (hopefully) literate, will be at the forefront of this change. It has to start somewhere. Competent and comfortable professionals as a part of the solution could be more far reaching than government stated changes that need to be made. School divisions could be a part of the support system for the teachers implementing these new outcomes rather than have it put on their plate.
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Good job on being on top of your assignments!
In regards to the curriculum question, I think it would be helpful for the curricullum to have objectives around digitial citizenship/literacy. As another reader said above, the change may start when younger educators are becoming the leaders in the school. Guidance from the government would be helpful though so that today’s teachers have a starting point that is meaningful to the students within their area (as opposed to finding resources online that may or may not reflect student interests and needs in SK).
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Hi Dalton,
I really like that there’s a curricular outcome to works specifically with digital citizenship. And it seems like it is broad enough to encompass many different topics and allow teach professionalism and agency, without being too restrictive and or unclear. I do like the last section that connects to faith and it would be really cool to see how various teacher’s interpret and implement those meanings into their own classroom.
Thanks for sharing, and I look forward to seeing your final course walk through.
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Very interesting, indeed! When I did the #EC&I834 course I was amazed to see people use Microsoft Teams and One Note to create an LMS system. Because our division is mainly Google-focused, it is tricky to wrap my head around how it actually works, looks, etc. So thanks for sharing some pictures! When my peers would share their screens and walk through them with me, it seemed easier to understand, but I still think that I would need some time to play around with it before being comfortable with it. Keep up the great work! Looks great so far.
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Thanks! It took a while to get used to it when it first came out, but it is probably the best tool to help include all other aspects of Office. Like Alec said in one of our after-class meetings… Google Classroom is also missing many pieces as some of these companies tried to throw together LMS and meeting platforms at the onset of Covid. MS Teams was Skype before they finally merged the two together in 2020. So, in some aspects, the pandemic created a space for companies to quickly improve their software and advance quickly but also means that not all aspects of digital education were covered with the quick implementation of apps that are missing a few nuts and bolts. Thanks for the comment!
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The other day I came across the OneNote that you had added me to and I was snooping around and what you’ve been working on is fantastic! I find that OneNote is so nice for a module type set-up and is easy to access and usr friendly. I hope that our school division comes out with some grade appropriate outcomes for digital citizenship soon. It doesn’t have to to be lenghtly, but even just 3 outcomes per grade would suffice. Great work!
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I agree. A little Ministry directive would be nice, but divisions can implement it too, I suppose. I don’t mind the PAA outcomes we have! … but if it only starts in 7&8 then there are many years of missed opportunities. Let’s hope that we see this change within our careers! Thanks for the comment!
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