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We've created the Digital ID wiki with a two-fold purpose: Provide students, teachers, and administrators with a toolkit of reliable information, resources, and guidelines to help all of us learn how to be upstanding Digital Citizens who maintain a healthy Digital Identity (ID) in the 21st Century. Build a collaborative platform for teachers and students the world over to contribute to our ever-growing curriculum collaborations and student-created content. Our goal is to help our students answer these three Essential Questions: What does it mean to be a (digital) citizen? What are my rights as a citizen? What are my responsibilities as a citizen? Students Objectives and Learning Outcomes: Stepping Up ~ Cyberbullying: By examining bullying within their own lives and across historical events and time periods, students will consider the importance of empathy as a 21st century skill, equally as important as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and skilled communication. Building Identities ~ Digital Footprint: By examining the importance of maintaining a positive digital identity, students will learn how to employ self-regulation to manage their own digital footprint. Respecting Boundaries ~ Intellectual Property: By employing critical thinking, students will learn the ethical use of intellectual property. Protecting Online Security and Privacy: By studying common threats to electronic security and equipment, students will learn to protect themselves and sensitive information."

"It is imperative to teach our students beginning with their first experience online to "read" the web discriminately. Students need to understand that just because something is posted on the Internet, it isn't necessarily true. Teachers should practice the skill of web site evaluation before instructing students. The Yahooligans Teacher's Guide: Evaluating Web Sites gives a good overall synopsis of web evaluation while the Cyber Bee's WWW.CyberGuides rubrics clarify the issues of both content and design. Tammy Barcalow has somegreat suggestions to consider when first introducing website evaluation. Check them out! There are also many alternatives for teaching students how to critically evaluate websites and several links are included below. Kathy Shrock's Criteria Evaluation Survey: Elementary Level is an excellent choice to use with upper primary students. The Schrock criteria are simply stated and appropriate for students starting in about fourth grade. However, the form is bit long and may overwhelm some kids. Since we need to consider the reading level of lower primary students, I have created two checklists specifically for younger children. These alternatives require minimum reading and writing while introducing website evaluation. There is one version for kindergarten and first graders and another for second and third graders . Another good option for our students is this Web Evaluation for Primary Grades. Regardless of the specific tool you use, site evaluation should include judgement about the following areas: navigation and usability, authorship and content validity."

The Maker-infused Curriculum - Making as essential to all learning "Making in education and the community is already underway in many different forms. Educators have found that students and people who have not developed confidence and identity in STEAM subjects through traditional courses have a different relationship to STEAM learning when embraced through the process of Making. Making encourages experimentation - students can make mistakes and still have confidence and a strong sense of identity to pursue their interests."- New York Hall of Science.

"Thinking Blocks is a suite of learning tools designed to help students solve math word problems accurately and efficiently. Using brightly colored blocks, students model mathematical relationships and identify known and unknown quantities. The model provides students with a powerful image that organizes information and simplifies the problem solving process. By modeling increasingly complex word problems, students develop strong reasoning skills which will facilitate the transition from arithmetic to algebra."

Mathematics Enhanced Scope and Sequence (ESS) Sample Lesson Plans help teachers align instruction with the 2009 Mathematics Standards of Learning (SOL) by providing examples of how the knowledge and skills found in the SOL and curriculum framework can be presented to students in the classroom. The lesson plans are accessible using a keyword search, or by selecting specific SOL objectives organized by grade level and reporting category. 

"Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment. Switching easily between vertical and horizontal orientations, researchers can quickly scan large number of events, highlight and filter events based on subject matter or tags, and recontextualize historical data."

Mathster Vakkas is a math specialist that has been teaching elementary school mathematics for 15 years. He creates research-based, student-centered, "real-life", math video-clips, tutorials, interactive video read alouds, and lessons that promote constructivism, cognitive development, and 21st Century Skills. His lessons are differentiated for all learners and will help children become better problem solvers.

"Organize your ideas, thoughts and documents. Share and find with ease. Save anything and everything that's important to you. Be it the contents of a webpage, an email, scanned copy of a business card or an important pdf file, anything. Take rich notes to save your crazy wild idea or a snippet of your latest code. Add annotations - via sticky comments, highlights, drawings etc, to these klips. Get a unique Webklipper URL for each of your klip. Share it with a small group of friends or with all your followers on Twitter - you'll be in complete charge of privacy settings for all your klips. Find your klips easily whenever you need them - search by klip content, annotations, url etc. "

Twenty Tips for Creating a Safe Learning Environment I visit a lot of classrooms. And I'm always fascinated by the variety of ways teachers launch the new school year and also by how they "run their rooms" on a daily basis. From these visits and my own experiences as an instructor, I'd like to offer my top 20 suggestions for keeping your classroom a safe, open, and inviting place to learn. by Rebecca Alber, UCLA

DOGONews is an online newspaper and web guide for children. "DOGO" (not Do-Go), means young or small in Swahili. Our goal is to provide a fun, safe and interactive environment for children to read and learn about interesting current events. Our news articles are short, simple and include photos/videos in order to keep children focused and interested. We also augment our content with an integrated dictionary for challenging words and maps for geographical context.

Current event articles written by kids for kids.

Current events articles with great photos, has a social networking component as well.

Creative Book Builder is a fantastic app that allows students to create books in epub format, which can then be exported to iBooks and shared with others. There are a variety of instructional uses for this app, from using it as a publishing tool for project-based learning to a summative assessment at the end of a unit. Students can embed images, audio files, video files, and write text. The advantage of an epub document over a PDF document is that all of the media will be preserved and available for readers to interact with when the final product is published.

"Using books teachers know and kids love, learn how to include economics while teaching students reading comprehension, and writing and math skills. Teacher guide provides basic concepts with ready-to-use lesson plans for each book. "

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.

"Gooru is a free platform for 21st century teachers and students. We offer a powerful tool for discovering complete lesson plans and curating content. Our comprehensive lesson plans made from interactive web materials bring the classroom to life. By offering these standards-aligned classplans and helping teachers find the best materials, assembling lesson plans is no longer a burden. This lets the teachers do what they do best. Teach"

"The Reading and Writing Project LLC provides literacy professional development to schools across the United States and the world, and generates ideas that are foundational to literacy instruction worldwide."

"The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. "

This is a cool concept.

"On our website you will find thousands of our free mathematics enrichment materials (problems, articles and games) for teachers and learners from ages 5 to 19 years. All the resources are designed to develop subject knowledge, problem-solving and mathematical thinking skills."

Recommended tinkering books from the Constructivist Consortium List of open-ended creativity software and construction materials used at Constructing Modern Knowledge Reggio Emilia books and constructive toys Project Websites and Communities Videos Programming/building materials Places to purchase parts and supplies Learning Materials Workshop 3D Printing and Fabrication MicroWorlds EX -A modern multimedia version of the Logo programming language, with robotics control with an optional robotics version Scratch - Free programming language for simple storytelling and games.

"We've created Yummy Math to provide teachers with an easy way to bring real-life into their math classrooms. It is our belief that when math is explored in contexts that are familiar and of interest to students, students will be more engaged to do math, reason, think critically, question and communicate. Our activities are written to correspond with the NCTM Process Standards and the CCSS Standards for Mathematical Practice."

Keep track of the noise level in your classroom using the calmCounter "Calmness Counter." This colorful tool is simple to set up and use. Uses the built-in microphone on your laptop or connect an external mic and watch the calm counter respond to the noise level in your classroom. This is a concrete way to quantify noise level needed for goal setting and behavior (sound) management. Even the young can understand this tool's "thermometer."