Thing 11: Digital Tattoo & Digital Citizenship

Both the videos in this section were fantastic. They were well done, eye-opening, and really got me thinking about my own social media accounts in addition to my students' accounts. The second video was scary to watch - I never would have thought to compare social media privacy settings to putting your pictures out in your front lawn, leaving you front door ajar, talking to complete strangers, and letting anyone look through your stuff and/or take a copy of your photos. The little interviews with children was great - they don't realize how dangerous the internet can be.

Another eye-opening section of this unit was the article on "The Atlantic" titled "Teens are Being Bullied 'Constantly' on Instagram." I had no idea that some of these things are happening all the time. This is probably happening to some of the students I have in my own classroom. The thing that shocked me the most was students creating multiple Instagram accounts - like hate accounts where a group of students will all gang up and bully a student.

As a music teacher, I have not really addressed digital citizenship. I have a classroom rule that students cannot use they phones. Our school building rule is that no pictures or videos can be taken.

I would like to introduce an activity into one of my lesson plans. I usually have the students do a music review at some point in the school year. It is usually a written assignment, but I have been thinking about ways to "spice" up the assignment a little bit. Since a lot of concert goers and reviewers are using social media - I was thinking of having my students to go a social media concert review with pictures and/or video (If they don't have an Instagram/Facebook/Twitter - they could write it up like a newspaper/magazine article). When introducing this assignment, we could have a discussion about professional and appropriate social media use. I could also share the article "Students Guide to Personal Publishing" with them.

I feel like this is an ongoing subject. By exploring the content in this section, I feel like I'm a little bit more aware of what is going on. I will continue to research and seek out new ideas to teach/embed digital citizenship.

Thing 19: Screencasting & Screen Sharing

For Thing 19, I chose to make a screencast and test out some screen sharing. My screen cast, using screencastomatic is above. This was really easy to use. I will definitely have some help/tutorial videos on my classroom website using screencastomatic. I also tried using Google Hangouts for the first time. I did a test with a family member. We started out with just a basic video chat. Then, I explored the screen share function. I was able to share any window that I had up on my computer. I was not able to figure out the other part, which appeared to be just a selection of what to share. This was such an awesome tool. I'm not sure how I will use this in my classroom, but I will definitely use it with friends and family. You can even add up to 10 people to the hangout.

Thing 14: Bitmoji Fun

This section was so much fun to read! I never thought about using bitmoji in the classroom. Just the other day, one of my students had a graded math assignment with a bitmoji sticker on it. I thought it was hilarious. I just read all these articles/blog posts about teachers using bitmoji to grad their students' attention. I especially liked how teachers used bitmoji to spruce up what would normally be a boring or dull topic, like class rules. I can totally see myself using it for my class expectations sheet. Also, I really liked printing bitmoji out on Avery labels and then using them as stickers. The one student I observed with the math paper really liked how his math teacher did that. It drew my attention right to the things he did well and where he needed improvement on his math assignment.