8th grade SS students are creating faux profiles for the Founding Fathers on our internal @elgg social network

Alessandra Cozzi is the 8th grade Social Studies teacher at The School at Columbia University. She asked if we could have the students do some sort of social networking activity where they would make Facebook-esque faux profiles for the Founding Fathers. I told her that not only did we have an internal social network (powered by @Elgg), but our 8th graders had experience doing this last year as 7th graders when they created faux profiles for the annual Great Mathematician Project led by math teacher, Dr. Sabrina Goldberg. Easy peasy.

As per every academic year since 2007 or 2008, our server admin, Cristina Martinez, sets up a completely blank Elgg social network and archives the previous year’s work. This allows us to continue to use the space for annual projects, and it also reaffirms that a social network is a completely blank and empty space until users freely and willingly populate it with information. @DonBuckley says a social network is nothing until users answer the following questions: Who are you? Who do you know? What do you do?

Alessandra and I created a .csv file with usernames, profile names, common passwords, and faux email addresses for the 55 delegates, and I uploaded this .csv file to The Social Network (btw, we named our internal online networking space The Social Network way before the movie came out). Today, students edited their assigned Founding Father’s avatar and profile and then also linked with the other founding fathers.

For this activity, Alessandra used the lesson plan linked below, and students filled out the worksheet linked below:

Lesson Plan for “Teaching Six Big Ideas in the Constitution”:
http://www.archives.gov/legislative/resources/education/constitution/

Student worksheet for creating a “Founders Social Network”: http://www.archives.gov/legislative/resources/education/constitution/images/handout-2.pdf

Working with 6th graders to update their digital portfolios using #GoogleSites

Amy Kissel (6th grade English), Peter Weiss (6th grade English Associate), and Dena Rothstein (6th grade Social Studies) collaborated on a Personal Artifact Project. Kids were provided a mason jar to fill with items that represented their identity. They had to choose and describe factually one of their own items and also compose a fictional story about a classmate’s item.

Later, I came in and asked the students create a new page on their personal Google Site for the 2013-2014 school year. They used this same Google Site in 3rd and 4th grade and will continue to add to it throughout their middle school years…or until the technology changes.

We talked about how this page should use the Announcements template so it can be structured like a blog. Because they took a picture of their jar and their objects, students use the 2-column layout for this first post. So the image/s could be in one column and the text could be in the other. We also talked about what it means to curate a portfolio and craft their digital presence.