At the NCCE "Teacher Librarian" Summit

Today I'm in Seattle enjoying the amazing Teacher-Librarian Summit at NCCE, which is our regional technology in education conference.  Richard Snyder is presenting on Digital Citizenship, which he defines as how we "access, use, and share information" and I'm spending some time reflecting on how I use social media in my library and also attempt to model good digital citizenship with my students.

Here is the conference WIKI

Anyone else at the Teacher-Librarian Summit blogging about the day?''

Great ideas from the presenters: 

I completely agree that you should definitely plan for your formal Web presence. And it is an excellent point to label your social media channel as an "unofficial channel" unless you are using an official channel and that you should be mindful about whether or not you actually plan on updating your social media channel.

How interesting to create a knowledge rating chart with words like "full text" and Boolean and have them rate their knowledge level (1 to 3) as well as the definition from their own words.  This is from Barbara Soltzenburg from Jackson High School.  Great idea for student self assessment!  Pre and post tests.

And now we are on to INFOGRAPHICS!  I want to find an easy way to have my students create easy infographics.  Will be looking at tools about this next. Here's one link that I'm experiencing: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/infographic-tools/  and Kathy Schrock's Infographics page. ''




This is an infographic that I tried to make on the fly using the tool called Infogr.am.  I was trying to see how easy it would be for a student to create an infographic on their Common Core writing prompt persuasive essays.

On to "Library of Congress" resources about Kathy Dorr -- "How do we help students be ethical users of resources when everything has been blocked?"  Always a great point to make.

Beth Clothier is doing a great job talking about Digital Navigators.  Great ideas and an excellent use of PowToons.

So what have I done in terms of connecting with students on social media in my TWEENER (5th-6th grade) school and teaching them about digital citizenship?

• Edmodo:  Last year I began an experiment hosting a book chat for interested readers on this sheltered social networking site.  We had teachers help identify students and did about 20 minutes of face-to-face instruction on Edmodo and then most other interactions online.  I had about a core of 20 students who stuck with me throughout the year and they didn't just talk about books but also about what they were doing on their weekends and after school.  They really loved it when they were able to "meet up" while talking, which I should have anticipated.  For my part, I created different "theme" weeks and created "assignments" that highlighted new books (heavy use of book trailers and author Web sites). There were survey questions that I put together to allow them to share their interests (Harry Potter vs. Percy Jackson?) and other discussion questions.  Through it all, when kids said the wrong thing, I tried to help them out both online ("I'm deleting your post when you called that other kid "weird," -- Do you agree?) and then I followed up with them face-to-face.   IT WAS WONDERFUL.  IT WAS EXHAUSTING.  I pulled back from it this year because I wasn't sure if I could sustain it for this whole year and also I had hoped that more teachers would have started using Edmodo by now so that this would just seem to be an additional channel that students had access to. 
• Common Sense Media's "Digital Passport." I have a "once every three weeks" class with a group of students and we have used this digital citizenship collection of lessons to shape the first half of our school year together.  The videos and game modules usually take about 15 minutes to run through and usually sparks some questions for students.  Since our class is only 30 minutes long, it seemed like the perfect amount of content.