11.5 Thing 11.5 Evaluation

My favorite discovery was screencasts. I enjoyed making one, and this is something I’ll definitely do again, and teach my students to do as well.

This program has affected my lifelong learning goals because it is helping me become a better teacher/librarian for my students. I feel like I am keeping up with technology, even though I realize that so much more is out there. I really like it when I have answers for other people on my campus when it comes to technology.

The only unexpected outcome for me was Second Life. It was so easy, I don’t know what I was scared of! That in itself sort of makes me worry – I really don’t have excess time to spend in SL!

I cannot think of anything to improve this program. Of course, we all need more time to work with these new things. But we can’t really expect you to be able to conjure up more time, unless it’s in SL . . . .

11.5 Thing 11 Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship involves many things. To help my students be good digital citizens, I will include in my lessons on the subject these topics: internet safety, netiquette, cyber-bullying, copyright, and website evaluation. These are not topics that you can mention once. You must reinforce them again and again (and hopefully the classroom teachers will help with this). In our district, we are using the Isafe lessons, and I find them pretty good combined with the brainpop videos.

11.5 Thing 10 Virtual Worlds

After reading so much about Second Life, I was eager to give it a try. Easy to do. I really enjoyed creating my avatar -- I can see how you could lose hours of your life in this! I have a hard enough time keeping my farm up in Farmville (Facebook) -- I don't think I can handle SL too much. But I loved flying! I'm sure I'll spend more time in SL.

However, I can see how teens would be very attracted to SL. It is very much like the RPG games many of them love to play. It would certainly keep student interest if you were showing them how to find information in SL! Although, since you must be at least 13 to create a SL account, I do not see my students in an elementary school using this. Perhaps in the future there will be something similar for elementary.