Our new and improved Independent Reading Site is up and running at @The_School thanks to @finlaycm.

Cristina Martinez-Finlay is the Network Manager (and ever so much more) at The School at Columbia University. Last year, she decided to embark on a personal journey to revamp our beloved but kinda ugly Independent Reading Site which had been a labor-of-love Google Site that Marisa Guastaferro Mendez and I launched in 2007. We even won an award for it back in the day.

Marisa wanted an internal space for kids to keep track of their independent reading, post book reviews, and social network about literacy. We examined GoodReads, Shelfari, and other sites before deciding to just have an internal Google Site that anyone in our school community could access and edit. The site was alive and kicking and heavily used for 6 years. Then last year, Cristina showed me her pet project. She used Drupal to build the site (because, lordy, that woman knows Drupal), and she built up a site that is internal, robust, and legitimately way more attractive to use. The kids love it.

Today, Eve Becker (8th grade English) and I reminded the kids how to navigate the site, add books, join groups, post reviews, and comment on other people’s reviews. Cristina was there to answer questions too, and I’m glad the kids had a chance to appreciate her to her face.

6th graders are sharing their Renaissance Photoshop projects

6th graders are uploading their finished Renaissance Photoshop collages to a shared album on The Gallery (our online photo repository powered by Drupal). I chose a few to include here. Katelin O’Hare and I are pretty pleased with the results.

We asked each student to write a reflection about the project on their personal digital portfolios. These are Google Sites that they curate and maintain for multiple years. Each academic year has its own Announcements Page on the site, and they add Posts for each artifact/description they include.

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…

Amy Kissel’s 6th English students are starting a MemoryCorps project influenced by @StoryCorps.

Amy Kissel will soon start reading The Giver with her 6th grade English students. In the meantime, she asked the kids to interview someone over their Thanksgiving vacation and record these stories via video, audio, or text. The idea of collecting and archiving stories is so profound, and even at her own Thanksgiving table, Amy asked her dad to share stories with the family. He replied, “Amy, I have so many. I’ve been around so long. Give me a specific question.” He also said to her, “When you’re finally old enough to ask these questions, the older generation is usually gone.”

Today, Amy asked her students, “What is memory?” After a discussion, we all watched a short video, Fifty People, One Question. Information about the filmmaker is listed on the YouTube link:

Produced and Directed by Galvea Kelly from Ireland – http://www.brandnua.com
http://www.facebook.com/brandnua
http://www.twitter.com/brandnua

Then we visited the StoryCorps website to see how they structure the collection of stories shared on the site. Each story includes a quote, a photo, a blurb, and a link. Amy then introduced the idea of building our own MemoryCorps, so she created a shared GoogleDoc with a table comprised of 3 columns and 18 rows. (One column per class and one cell per student – all students have editing rights). Like the stories featured on StoryCorps, the students too will include a quote, a photo, a blurb, and a link from the stories they gathered at Thanksgiving. If the student is unable to locate a photo, they can use an avatar/image that represents the story or the person. They will link to a transcript of the conversation in a separate GoogleDoc and also link to the audio or video file created with GarageBand and uploaded to our internal video server called TheTube (powered by Drupal).

(*** This is a modification of a project that Marisa Guastaferro, Monica Amaro and I designed last year. I wrote about it here.)