Standard A: Consider ethical, safety, and societal factors in making decisions.
Students in elementary school can explain why unprovoked acts that hurt others are wrong and can identify social norms, safety considerations that guide behavior. Students learn skills that can demonstrate respect for the rights of self and others. Students demonstrate knowledge of how social norms affect decision making and behavior.
Internet use and cyber-surfing is a weekly and sometimes daily event for students today. What does that mean for children, the internet and having the ability to understand everything that can happen when using it is something that everyone needs to be educated on when they begin. CommonSense Media is the resource that brings together students, teachers and parents in their Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Every grade level has a scope and sequence of lessons and assessments, both digital and paper that teaches about social media and internet safety.
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Digital Passport teaches critical skills related to digital safety, respect, and community. Teachers receive robust reporting of individuals and groups’ game play. Each of the five games include videos, three levels of game play, collaborative offline activities, teacher wraparound materials, and aligned Digital Citizenship lessons.
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Middle school and high school students can evaluate how honesty, respect, fairness, and compassion enable one to take the needs of others into account when making decisions. Students can demonstrate responsibility in making ethical decisions and evaluate expectations of authority in personal decisions and actions. Students will examine how the norms of different societies and cultures influence their members' decisions and behaviors.
Newsela offers a way students can look at current events to discuss social behaviors in the world today. Maybe the acts of politicians during an election year, or how fans act during a world series run, or protesters in another country wanting free speech. Newsela allows educators to print or assign online the articles at the students reading level based on Lexile levels to allow for differentiation, therefore allowing all students to equally participate in the group discussions.
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iCivics is a free tool funded and sponsored by the US Government and Supreme Court Judge Sandra Day O’Conner. Along with many government concepts this website has games and activities for middle/high school students to tackle many cases that have been in front of Juries and the Supreme court. Educators can create accounts that allow student logins and monitoring of completion, lesson plans to accompany the games/activities. Most games are 15-30 minutes, all can be played as a whole class activity with the class divided into groups.
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Standard B: Apply decision-making skills to deal responsibly with daily academic and social situations.
Elementary students can identify a range of decisions that students make at school and make positive choices when interacting with classmates. Students learn to generate alternative solutions and evaluate their consequences for a range of academic and social situations.
Using a mind mapping tool to brainstorm ideas isn’t new, but Mind42 adds a new dimension. This tool allows for the inclusion of photos, links and lists to the standard “bubbles”. Creating a “Story” map of characters with branches of their friends, then a list nest to them as to why they picked them as a friend would be easy to build in this platform. Creating a “flowchart” of strategies to calm down or how to handle a stressful situation including photos could be developed and printed from here as well.
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Show Me is an interactive white board app with a recording feature that records what the users are saying while they are writing on the whiteboard. Students can use this app to make a video that can explain how to handle situations. Students can write the word “Bullying” on the board while talking about what to do if students get bullied, or see bullying. Then “swipe” to a new board and write down “Cheating” while talking about what to do if students see cheating or peer pressure to cheat, etc.
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Middle school and high school students analyze how decision-making skills improve study habits an academic performance. Students learn to evaluate strategies for resisting pressures to engage in unsafe or unethical activities. Students gain the ability to gather information, generate alternatives, and anticipate the consequences of decisions. Older students analyze how present decisions making affects college and career choices.
A student planner that keeps track of homework assignments, class schedules, due dates and much more can assist students in making decisions and prioritize choices. The myHomework app can be integrated with the Teacher app so that educators can send updated test dates, syllabus information and announcements. Basic account is free, if you would like more premium options such as document uploads currently the cost is $4.99/year. Available on all platforms and users can access accounts on all devices.
Student blogs allow students to post journal topics and comment on other students work. This allows for peer-to-peer support and reflective comments by students. Using Edublogs educators have account control over the blogs and can see comments prior to posting and can monitor who sees the blogs. Students can set up blog pages to address specific topics and answer “student questions” in a forum style blog. Hosting such a form based website platform give students a platform to ask questions in a semi-anonymous way and being answered by peers. Weebly websites can have this style of forum setup as well and students posted must “sign in” with an email address. Educators or “monitors” can have rights to see the post before allowing it and others online can respond
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Standard C: Contribute to the well-being of one's school and community.
Elementary students can identify and perform roles that contribute to one's classrooms and family. Students also understand, identify and contribute to the roles within the school and local community.
Watch Know Learn is a website that has high quality slide shows showing different community helpers. Off-screen narrator describes the job of each community helper and where the helper works. There are a good diversity in gender roles. Narration includes things for students to remember like brushing teeth, recycling, etc. associated with each helper.
When creating classroom roles try a new group– Tech Leaders. Have students apply for the job by writing why they are technology leaders. Work with this group of 2 or 3 students before introducing a new website or technology tool. When the lesson is introduced to the whole class they will be ready to assist the class with the new technology allowing more “experts” in the room to assist and a smooth activity to happen.
When creating classroom roles try a new group– Tech Leaders. Have students apply for the job by writing why they are technology leaders. Work with this group of 2 or 3 students before introducing a new website or technology tool. When the lesson is introduced to the whole class they will be ready to assist the class with the new technology allowing more “experts” in the room to assist and a smooth activity to happen.
Middle school and high school students can evaluate their participation in efforts to address an identified school or local community need. Student can help plan, implement and evaluate participation in activities and organizations that improve school climate. Students are also involved in planing, implementation and evaluation in group efforts to contribute to the local community.
Educators that have students that want to look into a community or school service project, but are unsure where to start this is a website that can help with the planning process. There are several tool kits available and many ideas, including a “blank” toolkit if no other category fits the students needs. Resources on how to go about finding the needs in the local area, uncovering if something is already being done to address the same issue, and what steps to take to get started or connected.
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Creating a Google Form as a survey tool to gather information can help determine the needs within the community or school is a good use of this technology tool. This can be done as a collaborative group activity. Analyzing the data to determine the need to be addressed will increase the students ability to work cooperatively with others. Using the tool again during and after the project to evaluate the team’s process and overall reflective participation can be a good feedback tool also.
The tool transfers the information into a spreadsheet format enabling the data to create graphs, if setup for such data collection. This would make it simple to communicate the results in a visual format when the project was complete. |