Enter the Blog

This blog was created as part of my studies - MTeach (teacher librarian) -hopefully here you may find some musings on education, libraries, life and studying along with generally witty and insightful comments (if i can manage any!).

Please add comments along the way. I'll be glad for any input, especially from fellow students and library lovers

Kylie




Sunday, March 30, 2014

ICE guardians - digital citizenship

In light of the fact i'm doing a digital citizenship unit I thought this might be of  interest....
In the US iGuardian trading cards are being given out at schools and community centres to help make internet safety fun and accessible for kids. It would be interesting to see if they do any follow-up research on the program.

http://www.ice.gov/cyber-crimes/iguardian.htm

It also includes wallpapers and an app, presentations and links. For more information visit  http://www.ice.gov/cyber-crimes/iguardian.htm

Saturday, March 22, 2014

DLEs and group work 2

We have almost completed the initial part of our group work. And I have been pleasantly surprised. The googledoc creation and use has been quite successful as a way of communicating and adding ideas - though it would be great if some mechanism for alerting others to updates was included rather than having to forum post to let others know about updating.

Having said that I have now been encouraging others to utilise googledocs as a means of collaboratively adding to docs rather than emailing  versions. In reflection, I should not be surprised about this as I have recently felt that the most appealing pedagogical framework to me is social constructivism. I can see how this assignment and the way it is constructed fits within this and the model of a PBL or inquiry learning.

Friday, March 14, 2014

DLEs and group assignments

I confess that group assignments rather frighten me. I'm used to managing my own time and workload and to having control over the level of quality of my work (yes i'm a bit of a control freak and I lilke to do well). However, i'm hoping that this experience will be a good one and that the group i'm placed in will be cohesive.

In terms of DLEs and digital citizenship it has occurred to me that my initial idea of what a DLE is was not what narrower than the focus of this unit. I was thinking of it in terms of actual 'environments' or platforms rather than a DLE as encompassing the skills, tools, habits and responsibilities in using and accessing digital resources for learning. In some ways the broader definition allows wider probing of how DLEs can be developed and utilised to foster good digital citizenship skills and awareness.

I am really far behind in my readings and course work (yes already and its only the first few weeks!) and am feeling like I don't have a lot of the knowledge and understanding necessary to adequately contribute to the group work yet. I'm hoping in the next few posts that i may actually have some comments on some literature to add.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Digital Learning Environments

This week we need to choose a topic for a group assignment for Digital Citizenship. Our choices are digital learning environments, digital cizitenship in the curriculum, content creation and curation in digital environments and social media and networking.

I was initially drawn to the idea of content and curation - (undoubtedly its the Museum side of me) but after reflecting on things like sticky notes and diigo, Pinterest and other online tools I don't feel the same level of interest or ease of application in the education environment and I confess I have been an indifferent user of the diigo groups I have previously joined. DC in the curriculum may appear like an easier option but I think that Digital Learning environments seems like the right fit. I’m interested in the potential DLE tools like moodle, Edmodo, skooville and Mybigcampus to be used by TLs as a way of both providing access to resources as well as providing spaces for knowledge construction and sharing.

Monday, March 3, 2014

ETL523

This week marks the beginning of ETL523 Digital Citizenship.

It's probably worthwhile to record some thoughts about Digital Citizenship(DC) and how it relates to the role of the TL. My initial understanding of DC is that it relates to the behaviours and responsibilities we all have in the digital environment and that it encompasses issue such as cyber safety and bullying and awareness of digital footprints and ethical online behaviour.

In some ways the responsibility for this does not lie solely in any one teachers domain but needs to be the responsibility of the whole school - It has occurred to me that my children's primary school does not have a digital policy or framework in place to address many of these issues. In fact my 9 year old indicated that the only one that has spoken to her about cyberbullying was the WestTigers footballers when they came for a 'stamp out bullying' session.