Education | Beyond the Glass

Final Reflections on Creating a Digital Identity with Children

by Jackie Sakatch

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Tim & Selena Middleton

A final reflection is a bit of a misnomer because the work of creating and supporting young learners in digital spaces will be part of my teaching practice from this day forward. My learning journey has begun but by no means have I reached the end of the road.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by daveynin

I am proud and comfortable with the steps that I have taken to become more aware of resources available to support young people online and the actions that I have taken so far to make their learning activities a success. Highlights of these step and blog posts that reflect and document the growth are below:

Updated classroom blog that includes a Twitter account

Teach children to Tweet and comment on blog post.

We made a beautiful painting on canvas. We are proud of our painting. We painted the picture using team work. pic.twitter.com/jgLG1zY20Z

— Jackie Sakatch (@MrsSakatch) November 13, 2013

Develop and maintain a YouTube channel with my son.

Curate Digital Citizenship Resources for parents and teachers

Blog Renovations and Improvements

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by David Goehring

Next Steps

I plan to continue to use Twitter in my classroom. I want to expand the number of blogs that my students comment on and work with them to create entries for our classroom blog. Eventually I would like to connect with other classrooms through Skype. I am hoping to visit Kathy Cassidy’s classroom in the new year to see first hand how she supports her learners with technology and individual student blogs. Cory Antonini, our consultant stopped me in the hallway last week and mentioned that he had another teacher who would like to start to connecting their classrooms through Twitter and that he had another idea for me to try. I am excited to explore other learning opportunities. In the future I would like to explore creating individual student blogs or learning portfolios.

My son has numerous plans and ideas for his YouTube channel. I feel it is my job to support him but to also stay out of his way and allow him to create his own learning path. He has mentioned that he would like to create a playlist for his videos and wanting to create more videos where he interviews people. Perhaps he will create his own blog.

The Digital Citizen Resources LiveBinder that I have created is easy to use and I plan to continue to add content.

Final Thought

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Bart Everson

Classroom Connections Creating a digital identity

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Summary of Learning

by Jackie Sakatch

My goal for this term was to develop an understanding of how to use social media and open education with children in grade one and two and to begin to use the material I was using in my classroom and at home with my son. When I thought about creating my Summary of Learning, I felt that it was important to stay with the theme of working with children online so I decided to have my son interview me about my experiences in #eci831. Below is the interview outline that I created.

Today we are going to about my mom’s social media and open education university class.

What did you learn about social media?

I learned and I am using two new blogging platforms WordPress and Blogger.

The importance of your Professional Learning Network – network with people near and far – you learn

I understand the power of twitter to connect with other professionals, ask questions and share.

I enjoyed the connected relationship in the Google + community

I experimented with Scoop it and Flipboard – but I find I like to gather material on Twitter.

What did you learn in your class that you can use in your classroom?

Updated the classroom blog, added Twitter, and have started tweeting with my class.

I am thinking about how I can experiment with the Makey Makey in my classroom.

I talk to kids about Mindcraft and other games that are important to them and try to include the things that kids learn from games in my teaching.

How do you help your kids stay safe online?

Model how to be safe

Talk about being a good citizen – on and offline – you need to be the same on and offline. Both interactions are real.

Monitor students activities

It is important not just to create content but also to comment on other people’s content.

Computer equipment stays in an open place in our house.

Monitoring and posting Ben’s videos on YouTube

What is open education?

Sharing and using materials that have been licensed to be used. You need to look at the license that a picture or song is put online and be respectful of the person that posted it. You need to be aware of copyright. Creative Commons Search

Do you know when you brainstorm – and one person has an idea and then the next person adds to that idea – being an open educator means you are part of a community where you add to the ideas of others, you might reuse their materials in a different way and you let others use your materials. You use pingbacks in your blog to build on and support ideas in your blog. You are generous with your ideas and materials.

MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – Two types – One that focuses on teaching you content from a prescribe course outline and the other where you work as a community to generate and support each other.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Mary St George

My Commitment to Further Learning

Continue to use Twitter in the classroom. Develop a 140 square grid to help my children create tweets. Add a Twitter job to our classroom jobs so that tweeting becomes an embedded part of my instructional practice.
In my classroom follow and comment on other classroom blogs and learning.
Continue to work with my son to develop his digital identity and YouTube channel. When he is ready, I would like to help him develop his own blog.
Be respectful and mindful of copyright. Search for and use materials that are licensed through Creative Commons.
When I upload material, I will use a Creative Commons license so that I communicate my intentions for that material.
Continue to be an active community member on Twitter by adding members to my Professional Learning Network, contributing materials and ideas, and participating in chats.
Explore and experiment with new online tools and ideas using my PLN for support if I require help.
Continue to follow and read blogs created by other educators.
Continue to blog.

Tools: Twitter (scatteredmindmusings.wordpress.com)
Contribution to Learning – Assignment Part 3 (jhamiltonsite.wordpress.com)
The Future of Higher Education, the Future of Learning (slideshare.net)

Classroom Connections Course Reflections Creating a digital identity Professional Learning Network Summary of Learning

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The Gift of Openness

by Jackie Sakatch

Slide from: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2013-11-19.1657.M.E1C6971D0015BD348DBD143FC183D6.vcr&sid=2008350

David Wiley will be presenting to our #eci831 class on November 26, 2013. In his Ted talk, he speaks about openness, generosity, and sharing in education. David Wiley concludes that the more open we are in education the greater the improvements will be to education.

In the #eci831 class, we have experienced and benefited from the generosity of openness from these presenters:

Dr. Richard Schwier from the University of Saskatchewan – recording
Sue Waters – recording
George Siemens – recording
Sylvia Martinez – recording
Alan Levine – recording

Each of these presenters has exemplified their understanding and commitment to open education by sharing of their time and talents with us.

I believe another example of openness occurs on Twitter during a chat. This Saturday morning I participated in #satchat I was looking through the overnight tweets, saw the hashtag and thought it was a great opportunity to follow the conversation. The topic of the day was how to engage your staff in free professional development. A few things that I thought during the chat was how consistent the message of the importance of educators being connected. I was impressed with how open and giving the people participating were. People shared strategies and blog article freely, and how it was easy to participate. I think many of the people participating in the chat understood the concept of openness in the advancement of education.

Robert Munch shares a humorous look at how we encourage sharing in the Kindergarten classroom in the book We Share Everything. Occasionally I have worked with teachers who view sharing as a negative and wish to keep materials and ideas to themselves. I wonder what happens as we move through educational institutions and potentially become less willing to share resources, time, and energy than we expect a five year old in Kindergarten to share. During his presentation on Open Education Alec Couros mentioned the website Teachers Pay Teachers a website where teachers can purchase materials created by other teachers. Alec also shared the Open Educational Resources (OER) organization where content is Creative Commons licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-ShareAlikes unless otherwise noted that teachers may access instructional materials. I plan to spend more time exploring the resources available on the OER website.

At the beginning of the course Alec Couros asked us to consider how are you contributing to the learning of others? At first, I thought this meant commenting on other students’ blogs and being active on Twitter. I think it is broader than that now. I think what needs consideration is how you will be open and generous as you educate. What will you be willing to share to advance the education of others?

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Gideon Burton

Pigtails? A Piggy Back? No a Pingback! (jackiesakatch.wordpress.com)
#opened13 Keynote – George Siemens (oerresearchhub.org)
An Open look at Open Education | My Blog (myiace.wordpress.com)
Merlot 2: Open Educational Resources from California (dmll.jaltcall.org)
Are teachers afraid to change the way they do things? (kelseypanko.wordpress.com)

Course Reflections Professional Learning Network

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Blog Renovations and Improvements

by Jackie Sakatch

This weekend I started to make this blog my blog instead of a blog that I am creating for a University course. I started by adding a tag cloud and a widget that shows the blog I follow. I also personalized the blog by adding a Professional Development page. All teachers in Regina Public Schools are required to document their Professional Learning and Development. In the past, I have completed a goal form that I have shared with my administrator and colleague. I wanted to show my learning in a digital format. I have added the University classes I have taken and the Provincial Math Learning Community that I am a member. I am thinking about the format that I want to use to add my Professional Development goals to the page.

Another decision I made was to add a digital citizenship resources page. I thought it was important to compile some resources for teachers and parents to help them feel comfortable having their children become members of the connected world. While I am helping my son develop his digital identity through his YouTube channel and I work with my students to send out Tweets and comment on blog posts I often thought about what I needed to say to make sure that the children and I had the necessary skills to be good digital citizens. I created a blog page for this and started to embed videos and links but I found the list complicated and hard to scroll through so I decided to try livebinders. I have had a livebinders binder posted on my literacy links page of my classroom blog for the last number of year. I had never created my own livebinders binder. As I was reading blogs, I noticed that Greg, Lyane, and Rochelle all mention using it to organize resources. I liked the tutorial livebinders provides when you first create your account. I found them helpful but not too complicated. I embedded the binder into my digital citizenship page and deleted all my other links that I had added earlier.

I would love to hear any comments you have about my blog improvements.

LiveBinders (cis220fall13.wordpress.com)
Digital Curation: Putting the Pieces Together (suewaters.com)

Classroom Connections Course Reflections Creating a digital identity

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Fun with Makey Makey

by Jackie Sakatch

On October 22, 2013 Sylvia Martinez spoke to our EC&I 831 class about the Maker Movement. One of the many tools that she spoke about was the Makey Makey . After seeing the Makey Makey I knew that my son would love it and I thought it was neat too.

My family decided to play with the basic Makey Makey kit today. I found a piano program on the Scratch website that looked like it would work. In order to get it to work on my laptop I needed to install a driver the sparkfun website helped me out (my husband too!).

Here is our Makey Makey experience.

I look forward to continuing to play with the Makey Makey with my family.

Makey Makey – Standard Kit (sparkfun.com)
http://fortsanfamily.blogspot.ca/2013/10/makey-makey-innovation.html

Classroom Connections Course Reflections

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Creativity, Play, Technology and FUN!

by Jackie Sakatch

In our play we reveal what kind of people we are. ~ Ovid #moreplay #play

— A More Playful Life (@MorePlayful) August 23, 2013

This summer I had the pleasure of participating in The Play, Art and Narrative Summer Institute at the University of Regina. In The Creative Arts: A Process Approach for Teachers and Children Wallas stages of the creative process are outlined. Wallas’s stages include preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Balkin’s idea of the “re” factor is added to Wallas’s model. The “re” factor is

The creative person must continually rethink, reconsider, replace, refine, redo, reaffirm, reprocess, rewrite and re conceptualize. What better lesson could children learn in coping with life than the importance of the “re” component? (1990, p.30).

This first video examines how concern of parents for their children’s safety leads parents to have their children play inside more frequently and participate in structured activities reducing children’s access and time for free play activities. The video shows how parents use technology to keep track of their children. If we build a society that is based on mistrust how do we teach our children to trust and to be trustworthy. I watched the Sext up Kids video (Warning: Adult content) and I wonder if by placing technology in the hands of my child to act as a watchdog replaces trusting them to make decisions about what is safe. If I do not allow my children to walk home after school and go to the park to play without a monitoring device do I as a parent fail to teach them the necessary lessons of making good decisions? Do I make them vulnerable to using their devise to share pictures of themselves in ways that they later regret by not teaching them to make decision? In the video Elaine Raakman discuss her work with children in organized sports. She describing how when children are given a task outside of a structured setting they do not know how to think for themselves and they lack of creative problem solving skills. Elaine lists the skills learned through free play as cooperation, communication, creative problem solvers, and conflict resolution. The leaders on the playground were the risk takers and children were much freer to take risks when adults were not around. I would hypothesize that the same principals could be applied to the use of technology with children. If we give children the opportunity to explore with technology with some guidance, expectations and support but trust them to make decisions about what is appropriate content to view. They will develop the skills necessary to navigate digital literacy in a safe manner or know when they need to ask for help.

In the following TED talk Lawrence Lessig discusses how children naturally play with the digital tools that are available to them. He discusses the societal shift from a Read-Write culture to a Read Only culture and back t a Read-Write culture with the development of the internet. The internet provides opportunities for “usg” user generated content. People produce amateur content for the love of being creative not for the purpose of making money. This content is what children produce all the time by taking songs and remixing them. The tools of the film industry have become tools of digital literacy that children are naturally drawn to. Lessig goes on to say that our current laws should be reevaluate to give artists the freedom to allow amateur to use their content and remove the stigmatize of piracy from what children naturally due with their digital knowledge.

I am reminded of my own remixing experience this week when I was experimenting with iMovie. I read the help screen about adding music to a movie and was under the impress that I could use anything in a movie from my iTunes account that was not blocked. I added a soundtrack to my movie project from my iTunes account which I believed I had permission to use because it was not blocked like some of the track. I then added photos to the song to create a slideshow. When I tried to upload the iMovie to Facebook I received an email notification and a notification in Facebook when I opened my account that I had violated copyright. I believe that I could create the slideshow in iMovie using the soundtrack but once I tried to share it I had violated copyright law. An honest mistake.

Kirby Ferguson in Embracing the remix shares his idea that everything that we create is a remix. We take the ideas of people that come before us and remix it to create new content that we share and that in turn is remixed by someone else. Ferguson points out the irony of Patent Act of 1790 which was developed “To promote the progress of the Useful arts” and how by patenting technology will impede the progress of the arts. I think back to the work of Balkin and the creative process that parallels what Ferguson is saying about everything being a remix. One way that children play today is through digital means. They create, share and consume content through play. I wonder what new discoveries children will find through digital play?

Taking the First Steps.

by Jackie Sakatch

http://www.flickr.com/photos/89793512@N00/25171645/in/photolist-3e1DT-4f4wcm-4f4weQ-4f4wgL-4eZxbD-4eZx9c-8RjWhC-aB4snG-c9WoSu-dQJeAB-9UpiB4-9avMdM-if88z-e5mnii-6ZoKUu-5bhbCH-2gcH3r-5jPrtW-5jPrxQ-5jKaor-e8XEyw-dccoPF-8Nt-4qQ7uQ-azwwUd-ddVHGi-dW4ARX-9poeSo-4xjJCN-8E715f-4nSFpA-6WYyX5-azvzTn-6z6vcG-azyfKY-4L12Lm-4L12R5-goQMr-9JmxjP-8KgHuk-8KjLg3-iMfqi-5uxLqc-6b6ku9-8E8pA3-dSgbGx-hmE7E-8KjLfJ-8KgHv8-8KjLdY-c4unBw

I have been pondering the first step that I want to take to open the filing cabinet in my classroom. I am trying to decide between starting a classroom twitter account or introducing my children to a small number of blogs and teach them to comment on those blogs. The blogs that I would start with are Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom Blog, a teacher in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan who has written the ebook Connected from the Start: Global Learning in the Primary Grades which I have purchased and plan to use a Mentor text. Mme Fraser’s Blog who interned in my classroom last year and because I am teaching a number of children for a second year has a relationship with the children. I have also selected Mrs. Maley’s Classroom Blog because it was highlighted in the Leader-Post recently. The class has access to our classroom blog which I write but would like to eventually turn into a shared writing experience with the children in my class.

Sue Waters presented to my #eci831 class on October, 1, 2013 and spoke about the importance of not only creating content on blogs but also being a consumer of content and participating in the community.

The reasons for starting with twitter is that it is a quick way to community the activities that my class is doing with others. Twitter could give my class a larger and more diverse audience faster than reading and responding to my small preselected blogs.

When I woke up this morning my initial idea was to send out a tweet

Would you start connecting a grade 1/2 class with twitter or reading and responding to blog posts? @suewaters @courosa #eci831

— Jackie Sakatch (@JSakatch) October 6, 2013

asking what other people thought. I decide that I am going to send out this tweet. I am also going to post it on the #eci831 google+ community and create this blog post. I am curious about the different comments I will receive in each of the forums. I am wondering which forum will provide the most insightful comments and where do I feel the most supported.

To Classroom Blog, Or Not To Classroom Blog!! (mmcfaddenblog.wordpress.com)

Classroom Connections Course Reflections

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Community

by Jackie Sakatch

Dr. Richard Schwier shared his insights into communities and the factors that effect communities development online.
Dr. Schwier points out that we all have a need to connect. I think over at the beginning of twentieth century people connected in small localized pockets that they could travel to and from in day. Today I have the advantage of being able to connect with someone in another part of the world within seconds. The speed which I am able to connect may have increased but I believe the basic principles of community have stayed the same. People continue to use boundaries to help make them feel safe and as they begin to trust others in the community they slowly reveal more about themselves and their believes and practices.

I believe an advantage of participating in a community that stretches beyond the confines of registered course participants is that the authentic connections that are made will continue to support the development of my teaching practices beyond the four months of this course. Teaching can be a lonely experience but with an active Professional Learning Network I will be able to ask for and give the support that is needed.

Until Tuesday I had never realized the support that I could receive from developing a strong, supportive Professional Learning Network.

It’s a people business. (kelseypanko.wordpress.com)
Social Media: Not just about sharing what you had for breakfast! (ryanjosephson.wordpress.com)

Course Reflections Professional Learning Network

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A way of sharing classroom activities

by Jackie Sakatch

Smilebox is one of the tools I use to share classroom activities with families. The children love to see themselves in the videos. I often wish I could do more editing of photos in Smilebox. I usually create the presentation myself at home on the weekend. I would like to expand my practice by involving children in the picture taking process and by having them contribute to the caption writing process. Has anyone used this tool or a similar tools in their classroom?