Digital Citizenship Toys: The return of Carlton, Georgie and Humpy

I first started exploring the idea of using stuffed toys to teach digital citizenship last year in my kindergarten class. You can see my first post about it here. This year, as a technology integrator, I wanted to introduce the toys to more students. Just some brief background, last year @jasongraham99 & @NaketaNZ in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia respectively, helped me to create a website where our class toys go on some online adventures making some mistakes along the way. Click around and browse the site to find examples of both what to do and what not to do as a digital citizen: classtoys.weebly.com

I thought the concept of these class toys would be most appropriate for kindergarten and first grade so I created a slideshow using Smart Notebook so that I could use the Smart Response system with first grade. This would allow the students to interact with the presentation and respond to questions as I went through the slides rather than just listening. I chose to just use it as a slideshow and have students respond verbally in kindergarten.

Kindergarten Response

In kindergarten we broke up into partners and each partnership was given a page in Book Creator to respond to. We have 16 students in each class, so I created eight books with just one page in each iPad, each one was a different prompt. The students responded to their prompt by adding a sound clip to teach the toys how to be better digital citizens.

One of my favorite features of Book Creator is that you can work separately on different devices and then later export student work and combine them into one seamless book. This is how I managed to have all the children working in smaller groups simultaneously to create something collaborative. Here is an example of one class who worked in partners on each page to teach these toys how to be better digital citizens.

First Grade Response

The first graders created a digital citizenship pledge using ThingLink. They had to make three promises of how they would be good digital citizens. Here is an example:

I imagine that older students could possibly be presented with the website as a challenge. They could be asked to navigate the site in order to find mistakes that the toys made as well as explain why the toys should not have done those things. Perhaps even then provide alternatives to better examples of responsible digital citizenship. I might try this with second grade and see how they do.

I have also tried to introduce digital citizenship in alignment with our school values, so far this year we have worked on 'Responsibility', 'Kindness', and 'Courage'. After the holidays we will cover 'Respect' and 'Honesty'. Perhaps Carlton, Georgie and Humpy may need to go on some more digital adventures to demonstrate both positive and negative digital citizenship with respect to the next few values! What do you say Jay and Naketa? ;)