Image courtesy of: http://quotesgram.com/citizenship-quotes/
As mentioned in my post last week, I am planning on creating a space for digital citizenship resources for teacher-librarians (or any educator, really!) to access, share and contribute to. My reasoning for this is that there is SO much out there and SO many aspects of digital citizenship to consider (information literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, etc etc etc) that it can be overwhelming to figure out an actual unit plan. In addition, there is no one way to "teach" these subjects either. Finally, as many of us have discussed in our blogs, the role of the teacher-librarian can be isolating as we are the only one of us in our schools, and often we are the only ones that are raising these important topics with our students when they come in to do projects because it fits perfectly in with the context of research and online technology. Speaking from experience, a well-organized space that contains resources from the Web as well as homegrown, teacher-librarian-created lessons would be extremely helpful to have in my toolkit.
After some deliberation over what platform would be best, I decided to go with a Wiki. Although a blog can be more conducive to discussion and linking, a Wiki is better for uploading actual documents since once someone is a member, then they can edit the Wiki easily, which is what I'm going for- readily available resources that can be used with Mrs. L's grade 6 class who just booked in at the last minute for collaboration time and you're wondering how best to use those 40 minutes to teach an intermediate class you rarely see about digital citizenship (if you hadn't guessed, this is actually happening to me this coming week...) I think that there is still lots of space for commenting and collaborating on a Wiki as well. I'm planning on doing a shout out to all of the TLs in my district once I have my pages organized to start the sharing ASAP.
Here is my wiki-in-the-making... Not very pretty yet and super sparse but you have to start somewhere! On that note, I decided to spend a bit of time reviewing how to make a wiki and, more importantly, a GOOD wiki.
Here are some articles I found helpful in case your future vision is taking you to Wiki-land as well!
What Makes a Good Wiki
A Good Wiki Tells a Story
And I'm sure we have all seen this before (hard to believe it was made in 2007!) but I actually found it helpful to watch again before I really got going:
Good luck to everyone!
A good overview of the "why" and the "who" you are building this resource for. It is important to keep our focus on our potential audience and why they need this support. You demonstrated and discussed why you need to build this resource and provided some very specific examples in your current situation to support your rationale. A good blog post that goes over the evolution of your wiki final vision.
ReplyDeleteHey Jen
ReplyDeleteI was unable to view your wiki when I clicked on the link your embedded. Is it because I have to be a member? If so I will join as it seems like a good tool to use in the future. Are you wanting your final product to be something you use when teaching (posting comments, sharing documents etc.) ? Also great quote about digital citizenship and no one being on supervision, I liked that!
Thanks for the heads up! I still had it set to members only to view... now anyone can view but only members can edit. And yes, I'm aiming for it to be a living document where can share our best stuff! Feel free to request to be member and I'll add you!
DeleteHi Jen,
ReplyDeleteI really liked your plan for making a digital citizenship wiki, like a one-stop shop for TLs and teachers.
I've wanted something like that.
Since being back in the Library this past year and a half, I've felt that I've been concentrating on the culture of reading but totally dropping the ball on digital citizenship. That's why many TLs advise creating a five-year plan: too hard to do it all at once.
I've been starting to develop in my mind a website that would be a portal for the best digital citizenship resources...wasn't sure how to best go about it—your wiki is the way. Well done.
I'll throw a few of my ideas out there for the site I'll likely never make since I'll likely piggyback off of yours next year (and hopefully add to it).
Often the problem with starting to tackle teaching the topic is that there is too, too, too much out there, and it's all scattered about...and you wonder which one is the best...which gets overwhelming...
Anyway, I was thinking of setting up the idea/concept of a Recipe For Creating Digital Citizens.
So, the recipe would be a simple Take One Part ______, Add One Part _______, Plus One Part _________, etc, so that you had say five "ingredients."
The ingredients lists would be in the Pantry Cupboard (which would be like the wiki sidebar of topics links) under Ingredient Categories (your topics, such as online safety, etiquette, research skills...).
Thus, a teacher/TL could pick one item, any item, from each list, say one per week to whip up a batch of Digital Citizenship students by the end of the month...then start a new "recipe" for next month...
If that idea sounds useful to you or anyone else, feel free to use it—I'd love to do it myself, but won't likely get there for quite some time.
Thanks Chris! I love your idea of creating a recipe for digital citizenship... it makes it a little less overwhelming to just try a few things at a time. You can definitely become a member of my wiki and feel free to help yourself... I hope it will be useful!
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