I really enjoyed working with my school media specialist in creating this unit. Part of her role is to teach digital citizenship to 6th grade students, so I was able to work with her and complete some field experience and present this lesson to all 6th grade students in my building. Day one I saw about 100 students and each class the instruction and delivery was a little better. When I saw an issue I tried to fix it right then to alleviate further problems. For example, many students struggles to type in the weebly site correctly so I attached a link to the site to their Google Classroom so they could just click on that link. Over the course of 3 days I saw about 280 6th graders and co-facilitated the unit with the media specialist. The students seemed to enjoy watching the videos and completing the activities. Our students are not used to an online, self paced activity and they seemed to excel. The students were able to be out of their classroom, come into the media center and use technology to create memes, flipgrid videos and learn about digital citizenship. I also enjoyed trying out some fun formative assessment strategies using Flipgrid.com and a meme generator site. Students liked verbally communicating their learning experience and it was an interesting process getting them to record themselves and explaining what they had learned. I really enjoyed this aspect of the course. It was great being able to co-teach with our media specialist. Our district does not have an instructional technology coach at every school or site, so many times the media specialist will fill that void. It was interesting spending a few days in the media center and experiencing how I may be able to still teach and reach students outside of the core contend classroom.
Participant feedback
Below are examples of memes created by students used as a visual assessment. Students had a lot of fun creating these and it did show that they understood some of the material from the unit.
Below are examples of the flip grid verbal assessment completed during this unit.