6th grade #DigitalCitizenship lesson in #LifeSkills with @DenaeMSisco:

Below are the slides Denae Sisco (@DenaeMSisco) used to introduce a quick unit on Digital Citizenship. Sometimes, I like to drop the “digital” and just call this a Citizenship unit to reinforce that we should be good citizens online and offline…

After discussing the content of the slides and answering questions as they arose, students were split into groups of three and assigned a social media site to explore: Facebook , Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, YouTube, Wikipedia, Oovoo, Google+, kik, ask.fm. The groups were tasked with reading their site’s Terms of Service and answering the following questions into a shared Google Spreadsheet (see below for a screenshot):

• How old do you need to be in order to use this site/app?
• How can you use this site in positive ways?
• What are some concerns about this site (either your concerns or the site’s policies)?
• Who owns the content?
• Can you adjust the privacy settings?
• How would you contact the site to ask questions or express concerns?
• What are some actions that would cause profiles to be deleted or blocked?

Presenting “License to Cull” with @oharebros and @NewYork564 in Room 124 at 2:30! @The_School #ISTE2015 #artsed

  Super honored to be presenting License to Cull: Art History, Media Literacy, Ethics and Photoshop with my stellar art colleagues, Yoshiko Maruiwa and Katelin O’Hare from the The School at Columbia University.

We’ll share an integrated unit that examines fine art and the fine print. Students learn about ownership, copyright, licensing, media literacy, fair use, Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Photoshop.

See our slides full of links and resources below:

As part of the 6th grade integrated study of the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, we designed a Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character. While we teach the basics of Photoshop, we also facilitate rich discussions about a variety of topics including ownership, copyright, licensing, fair use, and the public domain. Our students use their assigned laptops to research, collaborate, and create throughout the unit. We discuss the Mona Lisa’s various owners and examine a variety of copyrightable contributions that have been made to Leonardo da Vinci’s original art from multiple artists over the years. We read the fine print and Terms of Use for Google Art Project and Artstor. We talk about how Photoshop is utilized to manipulate most images on advertisements and in magazines and how that affects body image and society’s standard of beauty. We discuss ways to locate fair-use art and dissect licenses from Creative Commons to encourage respectful and ethical use of others’ artistic creations. Further, we discuss the lawsuit between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over Fairey’s Barack Obama Hope poster. After completing their Photoshop collage, the students added their images to a shared online album. Additionally, students included their work on their digital art portfolios where they were expected to write an “artist statement” for their piece and comment on their classmates’ creations.

Notes/slides from a conversation about digital citizenship and social media

Last night, I facilitated a conversation on teaching digital citizenship and social media use to middle schoolers. Around the table were teachers, librarians, media specialists, technologists, curriculum coordinators, and administrators from Friends Seminary.

Their specific questions were:
1. How can we help middle schoolers be safe, responsible netizens?
2. How would you define digital citizenship and how does that play a role in your school?
3. How does social media play a role in your school and what do you do to prepare kids to use it responsibly?
4. What are some activities that you have done with middle schoolers on digital citizenship?
5. What is your scope and sequence in your school on digital citizenship (and others that you may know)?
6. What tools do you use, such as ELGG, to help kids understand digital citizenship and social media?

Besides showing projects I’ve developed/supported using Google Sites, our internal media repositories (powered by Drupal), or our internal social network (powered by Elgg), I shared how I weave in reminders, anecdotes, news stories, and life lessons at every opportunity.

I shared these three recent relevant articles which I’d seen on Twitter:

• Gangs in Anne Arundel use social media to recruit and intimidate
• Promote digital citizenship…10 ideas for rich academic student discussions on the internet
• 10 social media commandments for kids and parents

And this post recommended by Don Buckley to be a good conversation starter:

• Tweens on Facebook and Emoticons Overload

I also shared my collection of mantras that I repeat endlessly in class:

1. Everything you put online is public, permanent, traceable.
2. Use our technology academically, respectfully, responsibly.
3. Make wise choices.
4. We are a community.
5. There’s no such thing as privacy online. It’s public versus less public.
6. The only thing worse than kids behaving badly are adults behaving badly.

Rather than proceed through the slide deck I’d prepared, I ended up ignoring most of it and just sharing examples from specific projects (most of which are documented on this site). I embedded the slides below if anyone is super curious…

Showing 6th graders how to independently maintain their Digital Art Portfolios on The Social Network.

See the full gallery on Posterous

6th graders in Yoshiko Maruiwa’s art classes are adding a sub-page to their Digital Art Portfolios on our Elgg social network (we named it The Social Network four years ago). Yoshiko and I want the students to be able to archive their work and maintain their portfolio independently. Hopefully, they will continue to do so for the remainder of the year and into 7th and 8th grades. We also talked about having a physical portfolio of their work and one that exists in the cloud.

I had each class for an hour. These were my instructions:

1. Take a good photo. Without flash if possible. From a straight and center vantage point and not too high/low/left/right.

2. Upload photo to iPhoto and crop/edit/enhance as needed.

3. Add their image to the class album on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our in-house photo server powered by Drupal.)

4. Copy the URL of the full-size image.

5. In a new tab, login to The Social Network. (The Social Network is our in-house social network powered by Elgg.)

6. Create a sub-page in their Digital Art Portfolio.

7. Insert the image by pasting the URL, adjust the dimensions of the image, add border and padding if desired. We talked about how the basic WYSIWYG toolbar is “supposed” to be idiot-proof.

8. Awesome trick by a 6th grader: Remove the last digit of the height and the width to quickly resize the picture.

9. In the body of their page, next to their image, write an Artist Statement about their piece: Discuss what it represents, the colors and design chosen, the process…

10. Add tags as needed : 6th Grade, art, portfolio, painting, self-portrait, mosaic…

11. When finished, comment on their classmates’ pieces. We reinforced appropriate commenting:

Not so great – “I like your painting!”
Great – “I like your use of color and symmetry.”
Really great – “I like how you painted your guitar. Do you play any other instruments?”

In each session, we had three stations and a pile of cameras available for the kids to take a picture of their art piece. After, a student was at the front of the room demo-ing on the classroom iMac while everone was at their personal MacBooks following along or going at their own pace. Having a gaggle of cameras, enough download wires, and 1:1 laptops was awesome but not necessary.