Group items tagged

Designed to inform on the types of digital activities children of different ages are likely to be interested/participate in. Also provides a general overview of interests and attitudes of children by age group. Provides an area for parents as well as educators so they can align their teachings.

This article provides 5 playful strategies to re-imagine learning for 21st century pathways.  These strategies include creative recycling, medical research, coding for fun, land stewardship and active play.

n a recent Teacher article, two schools discussed their differing policies on mobile phone use during school hours. Here, we look at a range of studies that have explored the positives and negatives of allowing mobile phones to be used in class. As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs become more widespread, questions are being raised about the benefits of allowing students to actively use mobile phones as learning devices in school. Over the past decade, several studies have taken a closer look at student and educator perspectives on the issue.

"This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students' interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author's action research study, conducted while she was a teacher working in an Australian public high school and completing her PhD. The study investigates the use of a Ning online social network as a learning environment shared by seven classes, and it examines students' reactions and online activity while using a range of social media and Web 2.0 tools. The authors use Graham Nuthall's (2007) "lens on learning" to explore the social processes and culture of this shared online classroom. The paper uses his extensive body of research and analyses of classroom learning processes to conceptualize and analyze data throughout the action research cycle. It discusses the pedagogical implications that arise from the use of social media and, in so doing, challenges traditional models of teaching and learning."

Found in Communication Research and Practice: Vol 6, No 1 Abstract: Around the world policymakers are exploring the kinds of skills and competencies that teenagers need to have to contribute to society as digital citizens. Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child framework, and informed by critical analysis of discourses around digital citizenship, this paper explores the competencies already demonstrated by many adolescents and addresses the priorities identified by policymakers. It compares the top-down adult policymakers' blueprints for digital citizenship with the performances of citizenship by many young people, who mobilise digital resources to communicate with powerful others as a means of progressing their aims. Drawing upon examples of small-scale teenage activism, and linking these to some of the big questions of the age: climate change, gender equity and social justice, the paper moves beyond discussions of tech-addiction and online passivity to investigate adolescents' strategic engagement in digital spaces to achieve a more equitable future.

There are a number of labels to describe the young people currently studying at school, college and university. They include the digital natives, the net generation, the Google generation or the millenials. All of these terms are being used to highlight the significance and importance of new technologies within the lives of young people (Gibbons, 2007). For some, new technologies have been such a defining feature in the lives of younger generations that they predict a fundamental change in the way young people communicate, socialise, create and learn. They argue that this shift has profound implications for education (e.g. Prensky, 2001a; Gibbons, 2007; Rainie, 2006 and Underwood, 2007). Typically, supporters of this concept view the differences between those who are or who are not digital natives as primarily about when a person was born. This paper will critique and show new evidence against this conception of the digital native as based purely on generational differences. The paper will separate the 'doing' from the 'being', that is it will propose a number of digital activities (doing) that indicate digital nativeness and then examine which types of people (being) are most likely to demonstrate these characteristics. The paper will show that breadth of use, experience, self-efficacy and education are just as, if not more, important than age in explaining how people become digital natives.

Jenny Watts recently shared this useful website of activities on website evaluation.

"When we are active online we are creating our own digital footprints. This area of the website will help you understand what that means and will link you to tools and resources for the ethical use of online media." This Library Learning Commons provides good information on Digital Conduct, Copyright and more

This is an old article and I find that many of the examples are outdated. However, the underlying structure and social media literacies are as current and as valid as ever. -Attention (this is a big one for teachers and certainly one that worries everyone in my school. Some great strategies are described here to raise awareness among the students) Participation ("That doesn't mean, however, that all forms of participation are beneficial to the participant or others" "I don't believe in the myth of the digital natives") Collaboration (Here he talks a lot about collaboration towards social change and activism. Academic Integrity should probably be included here, too. "Though collaboration has a slightly different definition from cooperation and collective action, in general doing things together gives us more power than doing things alone.") Network awareness Critical consumption (I like that he talks about being overwhelmed with information and having to decide what action to take. It is a very hard thing to do though.)

Perceptive blog post by Australian educator Edna Sackson.

Edna Sackson

Abstract: Children and young people are spending more time online. Face-to-face interactions with friends are being supplemented with digital communication. Australian children are particularly prolific users of the internet (Green et al, 2011). This online activity creates digital footprints. Digital footprint refers to the information and data that people generate, through purposive action or passive recording, when they go online (Thatcher, 2014). Digital footprints now play a role in people's employment and educational opportunities (Black and Johnson, 2010). In this context not having a digital footprint can be as serious as having a badly managed one. One way to address this is for schools to explicitly teach students how to develop positive digital footprints that will help, rather than hinder, them in the future.

"Imagine if someone was following your every move no matter where you went, or what you did. It would be pretty scary but if you think about it it's not so different to the world we live in. Whether it's the information we share on the internet or our day to day activities. We leave traces of ourselves everywhere. Matt explains."

"The CyberSafety Net is an aggregator website that draws in the best resources from the internet and presents them in a logical sequences for each year level from Prep to Year 12. Teachers, Students and Parents can freely use the materials on this website. At Coomera Anglican College, teachers are using the CyberSafety Net as a combined Scope and Sequence and curriculum, embedded into RaVE (Religious and Values Education) , PC (Pastoral Care), PD (Personal Development) and homework tasks (Religious and Values Education), and implemented at school and during homework activities."

This article deals with the the range and impact of social networking sites on teenagers and children.

This is a digital book published in February ,2104. It is about the connected classroom and how to use it to engage students both locally and globally.

"A new app allowing parents to look at their children's call history, text messages and internet use will soon launch in Australia. The app, called Teensafe, already claims 1 million users in the US. But Australian police are warning that while the threat to children from online predators is real, spy apps allowing parents to track their children's smartphone usage are not a 'silver bullet' and could breach trust."

"With the Research and Information Fluency lessons in our highly acclaimed free CyberSmart! Student Curriculum, our goal is to actively engage students in making good search decisions and in evaluating the resources they encounter online."

This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances-especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question-as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

Unfortunately the instructions located at diggo seem to have missed the JavaScript step. I.m sure theybwere there before! Anyway - the code in this pst works