Digital Citizenship PBL: Learning Safely and Responsibly.

Last week brought a close to our first project based learning experience of the year.  I have recently shared information about launching our PBL, updates on our PBL, and how we collaborated with experts virtually.  After lots of learning and fun, we were ready to share what we had created.  I completely forgot about taking pictures during the presentation, so I am grateful to Su Brusco for sharing this picture with me. 

Click on the image below to see each group's presentation.

The kids did an amazing job during their presentations.  They did the everything from the introduction to facilitating the question and answer session.  I was so proud of them, but more importantly, they were proud of themselves.  

Our class wants to thank the following people who helped and supported us during this learning experience:

Mrs. Brusco and Mrs. Nickols for helping us launch our learning.
Mr. Froese, Mrs. Windham, and Ms Lamb for answering our questions
Ms. Brant for helping us with technology
Mrs. Gwyn and Mrs. Roberts for meeting with us and providing feedback
Ms. Fry, Ms. Casida, Ms. Garrett, and our parents who attended our presentation

While this was a wonderful learning experience, it was also a great deal of fun!

Update on our PBL

As I shared before, our class has begun our very first adventure with Project Based Learning this year.  I was out two days this week, attending a workshop, but we still moved forward in our learning.  

Since our last post about our PBL project, we had two visitors come to our class to share their knowledge with us.  

First, Mr. Froese, the director of Educational Technology for our district, came to speak with us about digital learning.  We had lots of questions for him and he had even more for us.  He really helped the kids dig deep in regard to what direction they wanted to move with their projects.  He also gave us ideas for how to frame key words for our online research.  

One of the words on our rubric was creative.  As the kids discussed the rubric, they wondered how they would know if their project were creative.  Mia remembered a lesson Mrs. Windham, our GT teacher had done over creativity so we invited her to come visit us again for a brief review.  She brought FEFO with her and gave us some wonderful information.  She even left a poster she had made to explain what FEFO stood for (Fluency, Elaboration, Flexibility, Originality.)  We will definitely use this as we begin to consider products to share our learning.  

One of our "Needs to Know" questions was How do we know if a website is safe or not?  As a class we are exploring this question (more to come on this in a future blog post.)  Each team of students decided to select one of the tools we use as digital learners and create a product to share with other second graders so they will know how to use these tools safely and responsibly.  Below are our teams.

More to come soon!

Pic Penguins--PicCollage

Twitter Tigers--Twitter

 Bird Bloggers--Kid Blog

FASTTMath Fasties--FASTTMath

Smart Hawks--SmartBoard

Perfect Pals: Puppet Pals

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Launching Our First PBL

Our campus is participating in a common-threaded PBL.  During a recent campus professional learning teachers were challenged to design a project based learning experience around the theme of digital citizenship.  Our team reviewed our technology TEKS and decided to focus on the following TEKS:

5B Comply with acceptable digital safety rules, fair use guidelines, and copyright laws.

3B Use search strategies to access information to guide inquiry

Our driving question is:

How can we, as digital learners, teach other second graders to use technology in a safe and responsible way?

We launched our learning today with an entry event created by some of our district Strategic Design Coaches.  (Thank you Su and Stacey!)

The students were excited to begin their project.  I will continue to blog about our journey.