Hey readers,

With the assigned topic of digital literacy for today’s post, I am reminded of last week’s activity in class where we spotted the troll. Prior to this activity, I was under the assumption that my digital literacy skills were good. In trying to “spot the trolls”, I performed very poorly and got nearly every guess wrong, which was an eye-opening experience. It is a fun activity to try on your own.

While I’m not on the internet as much as when I was as a teenager, the fact that I am going to be in a classroom teaching about digital literacy means that I still need to prioritize learning digital literacy for myself. For this week’s post, I spent a lot of time looking at resources aimed at improving digital literacy, and teaching digital literacy for this blog post, and am going to relate some of these to how they could be applied in secondary education.

Looking at the NTCE’s Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age Article, this article was incredibly interesting. It breaks down a definition of digital literacy into a lens that makes it applicable to curriculum. It makes a criteria of what successful participants in global society must be able to do (seen in the list below)

I found this criteria similar to outcomes; further down the website these outcomes are further broken down with “indicating” questions that help to answer whether these outcomes have been achieved or not. This is a really useful site, and as an educator I think it provides us with a good framework to better know the levels of digital literacy that exist within our classrooms.

We live in a highly sensationalized, and highly politicized world. With people on the internet more and more every day, we constantly see news. Identifying whether news is real or fake has become nearly impossible for the untrained eye, and I find this frustrating as a social studies teacher in training, who will have to navigate through all of the manipulation that takes place in the digital world. Knowing how to spot media manipulation is something that is becoming extremely important in this context. I spent time checking out the Data Society Article, which discussed this topic in depth. It provides the reader with ways that we can spot fake news/media manipulation which I find to be extremely relevant within a context of secondary social studies.

There is a lot to know behind why trolls exist online, what trolls are trying to achieve, and how to spot trolls and manipulators online. It is kind of overwhelming, but luckily in the digital world, there are near-infinite resources out there. The NTCE article was kind of my favourite resource that I looked at, as I enjoyed that it was looked at very specifically through a lens of curriculum/education that can be easily related to my practice as an educator.

Hello readers!

So, this week, I became a game developer!

We were assigned to try out some coding softwares which are designed to spark the interests of kids who may have passion for video games/coding/computer science. I chose to try out one called Hour of Code.

As a brief preface, I would like to note that I have very limited experience in writing code. I took Computer Science 20 six or seven years ago, and I sucked at writing code! In that class we used a program called Python to write code, and maybe it was just me, but I was not good at writing code and as a result I have always avoided activities relating to computer science ever since.

Hour of Code features many different “games” which the users choose from a library of options. The user is able to practice writing code for the game which they choose, essentially creating the game for themselves, customizing it, and then being able to share it for their friends to play. This ability to create and share creations with friends really reminded me of the SAMR Model which we discussed earlier in the course. Apps like Hour of Code are redefining the ways in which disciplines like computer science and coding are able to be taught and learned.

I spent an hour or so playing around with Hour of Code, and decided to make a Flappy Bird game, since it seemed simple enough. Below are some screenshots to illustrate the kinds of things that I was doing on Hour of Code.

Looking at the image above (for whatever reason the resolution has gone downhill, so my apologies), you can see that this is a much more simplistic piece of code than the creation that I finished with on the image below. I really enjoyed how the app eases the user into coding, and familiarizes you with some of the language. I feel like if I had access to software like this as a kid who loved to play video games, I would’ve probably seen coding as a much less daunting task when I tried it in high school.

The image above is the final piece of code that I designed. I chose to make a Flappy Santa game, since it’s almost Christmas time! If you would like to try it, here it is.

As always, thank you for reading! I hope you are all doing well as we enter this last stretch of this semester.

Hello readers,

For this weeks’ assigned blog post, we were asked to cover the extent to which cyber safety – also known as digital citizenship – had been taught to us, as well as the methods through which they were taught to us as students.

For context, I graduated from high school in 2018 in Weyburn.

I don’t feel as though cyber safety and digital citizenship were topics that my teachers were prepared or equipped for. I don’t think many of them would have grown up in an era where cyberbullying, or the nine elements of digital citizenship made sense. Thinking about it now, I cannot really recall many discussions that were had surrounding the issues that have arisen from a highly digitized world, and that is strange considering it is the world I was raised into. I thought of one example where we were spoken to about topics that related to digital citizenship.

I’m not sure how many people are familiar with an app called YikYak (no, not TikTok), but when I was in high school it became a highly controversial app in which people could anonymously post anything. Anybody with access to YikYak within a certain distance could see these posts and reply anonymously. Obviously high schoolers gravitated towards it, and it became an app where stupid, and harmful rumours were spread. Kids would refer to whoever they were posting about by using their initials, so it was often very cryptic among teenagers. It obviously became a pretty big issue within the school I attended, and it got to a point where our teachers would openly discuss the harms of YikYak, and basically just told us how stupid of an app it was. I’m sure the app is still around, but after a while they were forced to take anonymity out of the app, which kind of killed it for our school. That is the one time I can clearly remember some of the elements of digital citizenship being brought up within my educational experiences.

While I did not often have these conversations with teachers and educators, or even my own parents, I did often see posters about stranger danger, or cyberbullying scattered throughout the hallways. These were more fear-mongering tactics than anything. That is what my memories of being taught digital citizenship consists of more than anything, and I am curious to hear if anybody’s experiences are similar to mine.

Thanks for reading my blog.