Without Continual Growth...
Benjamin Franklin said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” I was thrilled with the results of our second PLC. My teacher participation was fantastic, the follow through with students taking the quizzes and teacher completing the FlipGrids was great, and I got so many comments, questions, and suggestions for technology education as we move forward.
As we started this process, I think more than anything I wanted the students to be exposed to digital citizenship so that they had a foundational knowledge of what a good digital citizen looked like. This goal made sense when I was working with just one grade and one class. However, since the project changed to include our entire school district in grades kindergarten through six my goals have shifted. I still want students to gain a good foundation of knowledge on digital citizenship, but I also want to ensure that teachers understand the importance of digital citizenship for our students starting from the moment they step into our schools. We need to understand that many of these students have devices and have never been and in some cases will never be taught how to use them appropriately, or even monitored with their use. It is our job to educate the students so they understand their responsibilities in handling these devices, and understand how it can impact their lives and the lives of others.
After leading this last PLC, and hearing the ideas that teachers had I feel like we have started this journey in a great way. Our teachers came up with ideas on how to improve the first lesson, on how to reach all the kids on a more consistent basis (not just with 1 lesson a month), with how to tie in parental involvement, and with ways to present our needs to administration so that time can be made for this extremely important topic. To hear how many teachers were getting involved in creatively brainstorming ways to reach more parents, and reach administration it let me know that they are invested in the importance of digital citizenship.
Our PLC started out with teachers sharing that they believed there was a need for more examples of media balance in the lesson that was taught. They were curious about guidelines that maybe we could give to parents and try to have the students adhere to. I was able to share with them the information that has been released by the American Academy of Pediatrics that I referenced in my fifth blog post. Additionally, this had the teachers talking about ways we could reach parents. Some of the teachers shared the handouts we completed from our first lesson with the parents of those students at parent teacher conferences, and another teacher sent the handout home and had parents sign it to show they also saw how much media students used in a day. These were ideas that I wouldn’t have even thought of, but our teachers did a great job keeping parents in the loop. Ultimately, the teachers were in agreement that we have to have a day or evening where parents come in to hear the digital citizenship information. We agreed that to get maximum parent attendance it would be best to do this during back to school night.
Next, we discussed the second lesson and talked about the importance of students not falling into traps online with clickbait. This is important because even as adults, clickbait is one of the most prevalent ways that hackers are able to infect devices with viruses, malware, spyware, and even sometimes steal important information. Not many of the teachers thought about the idea of clickbait being something that we would need to teach, however when it was presented to them in a way where they could easily see how a student would click on it, I think we got a lot of teacher buy-in. The lesson does a good job in explaining the dangers of clickbait and I am excited to see how the second lesson plays out.
The last thing we went over as a group was the timetable that was placed on the digital citizenship lessons. Unfortunately, we will not have any more PLC’s in order to follow through with the staff. That means for the rest of the year, our group will need to communicate via email and FlipGrids. We emphasized the importance of this in our PLC, and then also in our follow-up email (which can be viewed by CLICKING HERE FOR THE EMAIL, CLICK HERE FOR THE CHECKLIST). Additionally, we provided teachers with a checklist like before and the full year timeline. This was requested by the teachers and it is something we will have to keep sending on a bi-monthly basis to remind them of upcoming assignments and deadlines.
The most difficult part in ending this PLC adventure is finding ways to keep the staff motivated to continue the great work that was already started. In reading about ways to keep them motivated and passionate about their work there were a few things I really want to focus on moving forward. (CLICK HERE FOR THE ARTICLE) I want to make sure that I not only watch their feedback, but respond to everyone. The importance of making sure their voice is heard is huge in getting them to continue to buy in. Additionally, I want to stay in touch with our bi-monthly emails. This ensures that they know we are still valuing their time and efforts, and the last thing I want to do is provide them with data that shows we are using the results from students’ quizzes and from their FlipGrids. Another thing that is extremely important is understanding that by leading this project without seeing, speaking, or even being in charge of the teachers each day, they will need positive feedback and praise to want to keep working on this project. This was mentioned in the following article, (CLICK HERE) and it emphasized the importance of giving credit to the entire group for anything that we are able to accomplish. I think that is what is most important, realizing that we achieved this progress as a team. I hope this project continues to gain steam and is valued enough that in the future we can add a specific time in all teachers schedules to teach technology and digital citizenship. Our job is far from over, and as Benjamin Franklin noted we need to have continual growth!
The PLC can be viewed just below:
