As I look back at my major project, I am very happy with the learning that has taken place for myself, but more importantly, for my students. As noted in my first post, the aim of my project was to work with a group of grade 3/4 students on understanding their mental health and developing coping strategies.
One of the best parts of this project was exploring the Microsoft Teams Reflect app. Our students began each day checking in on their devices. The Reflect app gives them a visual and written description of a wide variety of emotions. Once students choose their emotions, teachers are able to see their entire class’ feelings on their dashboard. It provides a great snapshot of how everyone is feeling that day. This lets us know first thing in the morning who we need to check in with to see why they are feeling outside of the green zone.
Each September, all staff and students of my division are required to sign an Acceptable Use of Technology Agreement. The agreement is vast in covering what technology is, privacy and tracing, and access to the division network. The agreement is in part to protect the division:
“Inappropriate use of the Technology may expose the school division to legal liability and/or public embarrassment. The objective of this administrative application is to balance employee and student ability to fully benefit from informative technology against the school division’s need to ensure that all use of the Technology meets the school division’s legal obligations and upholds the Division’s reputation and public image.”
It also lays out the consequences of not using technology appropriately, including discipline in the form of loss of access to technology use, legal action, and financial responsibility.
This agreement is very consequence based. This is what we expect you to do, and if you don’t this is what can happen. It is important to note the consequences. Ultimately, the division needs to protect itself, perception wise, legally, and financially. But there is not much mention of what students should be doing. Teachers need to focus on teaching responsibility in the classroom – here is what we want you to do when using technology. Similar to the positive behavior program we use at our school, we want to catch and reward students for doing the right things.
I wonder what our division’s policy would look like if it were rewritten in a responsibility format. Does anyone have examples of what this looks like in your schools/divisions?
Like Brittney M., the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is scroll through my emails, messages, and the news. I check various news sites multiple times a day as I like to stay up with what is going on in the world. As such, over the past number of years, I have become fully aware of needing to determine what is real, fake, or biased.
Like many other negative things in this world right now, I blame Trump!! Just kidding. While kind of, but not really. There is no doubt that the Don shifted the information landscape with is campaigns of disinformation and compulsive patterns of blatant lying. (By this point, you are probably picking up on my bias towards him and his cronies. Oh well, my blog, my thoughts right?!?!)
I concluded last week’s post mentioning that I would go into the three surveys that we administered in this week’s post. So here goes…We developed three surveys to do some deeper digging with our students and families. We had a survey for our grade 1 and 2s, grade 3-8s, and one for our parents. We used Microsoft Forms as our platform as it offered multiple question formats, gathered and organized feedback, and included immersive readers for students who needed help reading questions. I have to say, Microsoft seems to be doing some great things. My experiences with Teams and Forms have been easy and exceptional.
I love this blog prompt! As you can see from my title, this topic is allowing me to relate this course to my comfort zone – Physical Education. Let’s be real, Phys. Ed. gets a bum rap from most teachers. However, we take pride in our area and one of our favorite catch phrases is:
Wow! I can’t believe it has been a month since I’ve provided an update on my project. Time flies! I am happy to report that I have had a busy and successful month of project work with my Grade 3/4 students. Over the past month we have:
continued our use of Microsoft Teams for daily check-ins with our feelings monsters
continued to learn about zones of regulation
discussed emotions related to anger, frustration, being upset
learned about stress
learned and practiced coping strategies for our toolboxes
administered three surveys – primary, middle years, parents
analyzed survey results and generated some ideas for the future to address needs
Let’s chat about all of this in a little more detail.
I am going to approach this post as it pertains to one particular area of Digital Citizenship – informational literacy.
Christine’s article, What is media literacy, and why is it important? notes that kids “take in a huge amount of information from a wide array of sources, far beyond the traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) of most parents’ youth. There are text messages, memes, viral videos, social media, video games, advertising, and more.” How students are interpreting all of this information and determining what is accurate and reliable is an important concern. Perhaps the most important part of the statement to me is the part about how different our student’s worlds are than their parents were when they were the same age.
We’re all aware of the fact that kids are often ahead of adults in their understanding and experience with technology and different apps. I think for a lot of parents you can compare their experience to doping in sports. The athletes who are doping are always one step ahead of the people who are testing. Therein lies the importance of teachers and schools. I don’t think we can ignore the role that we have to play in teaching students about informational literacy. I would be the first to say that we as teachers have a million other things that we could focus on. However, this is an important part of our students’ lives, and the reality is most students aren’t getting the skills they need to navigate this world outside of the school.
Informational literacy is the ability to identify, find, evaluate, apply, and acknowledge information. We live in a society where we want information right now, and we want to be able to share it as fast as possible. What gets lost in this speedy process is the researching and confirmation of the accuracy of the information we are reading and distributing. Fake news is definitely a thing these days.
We have to prepare our students to combat fake news and this has to be done in schools. The way to do this is to teach our students to become informationally literate. I can’t speak for all teachers and schools, but I am willing to say that most teachers can do a better job of this. I think there are many teachers who go as far as saying don’t use Wikipedia because it isn’t always accurate. This doesn’t begin to cover what needs to be covered. Students need to be taught how to identify trusted sources, perform research, understand sourcing, triangulate information, triage contested narratives and recognize the importance of where information comes from, not just what it says.
So what does the future look like? Dane Ward raises an interesting point in THE WAY I SEE IT: The future of information literacy: Transforming the world. “I see a new day when students will learn to use information skills to improve the world. It will be a day when information literacy instruction means teaching students about research while helping them to find value in the world and to participate in it.” Yes, we need to teach research skills, but we also need to make sure students find an interest in it and know why it relates to their lives. The fake news dilemma can be a great gateway to engaging kids and teaching valuable skills.
It has been a busy couple of weeks for myself and my students as we undertake our mental health learning journey. Our initial weeks have been filled with understanding our emotions. As I had mentioned before, the students in our grade 3/4 classroom check in using the Microsoft Teams Reflect App every morning. When they sign in to their account, this is what they are met with:
