Wrapping Around to Digital Citizenship

I always appreciate the weeks in class that we focus on digital citizenship and digital literacies. This is what relates most specifically to my work with fifth graders and what I've focused on for my work with the students this year. I've found how important it is to foster a strong foundational understanding of digital …

Youth Creativity

When reading the articles "Black Teens are Breaking the Internet and Seeing None of the Profits" and "Poor Meme, Rich Meme", I found myself thinking about my students and their own internet usage. As mentioned in the articles, black culture is widely expressed online and creativity is abundant and visible. However, the media they create …

Civic Engagement in Fifth Grade

Reading about the Harry Potter Alliance was really fascinating and inspiring for me. The Harry Potter series has always been influential in my life. I read the series about once a year and may or may not have multiple Harry Potter tattoos. This year, I did what I've wanted to do for years. I started …

Information Online

When reading Networked this week, I was thinking about many of the points they brought up. Some of which I agree with, others that left me wondering. The first point that the chapter mentioned was the idea of linking within digital text as opposed to the limited text features available in print media. I thought about …

Text to Music

This was the weirdest play I have done yet. The results were absolutely not what I expected. I found the idea in the collaborative "make bank" titled "Turn Text into Music". This page takes you to a music generator where you can input text and generate sheet music. You are given personal choice in the …

Media Literacy Twitter Chat

Tonight I participated in a live chat on Twitter surrounding integrating Media Literacy with Social Studies education. This chat was lead by Renee Hobbs, author of Discovering Media Literacy: Teaching Digital Media and Popular Culture in Elementary School. I read this book last quarter and dove into teaching media literacy in my classroom. I've followed her …

Participatory Culture

This week I've been thinking a lot about participatory culture surrounding digital literacies. The article "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" defines participatory culture as "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of …

Final Make – Blogging and Media Literacy

To bring together both main focuses of this quarter for me, I wanted to merge blogging with media literacy. As I've been studying Kathy Cassidy and other teachers that blog with students, I've seen how much I can expand blogging away from just a space to reflect on learning. While focusing on media literacy, I …

Protected: Time Lapse – Round 2

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The World of Gifs and Memes

For my make this week I chose to create a gif and a meme. Mostly because I frequently use gifs and memes when communicating and they've become so instrumental to online communication. I had never created a gif or a meme and I wanted to see how easy it might be to do so. I …