Have you ever had to change directions? Well, I did…
My class was learning about the Sustainable Development Goals, but I noticed as students entered the room they were busy chatting about video games, connecting with people online and talking to each other via a messaging app. I started to think about digital citizenship, internet safety, and just how digitally savvy were my students?
At this point, I thought we need to work on Digital Citizenship and Safety. I started to look for resources to support this learning. I found some great short videos aimed at my student’s grade levels at NetSafe.
I had a new app called GoBubble which is a safe social media site for children under 13. I also had Buncee for students to demonstrate their learning and create posters or other digital artifacts of their learning. I had three great tools at this point but I wasn’t sure how I was going to combine them.
Then I had my AHA moment! I knew how I was going to use all these tools together.
I used Buncee to create my provocation questions and GoBubble to have the discussion online about our key questions. We will have an authentic chat using social media to discuss different aspects of internet safety with the students. We watched the NetSafe videos after our GoBubble chat to see if our responses were correct. My students were very excited to use GoBubble to have our #Digcit chats.
Our first conversation required a fair bit of time, students needed to get used to writing bubbles to explain their thinking. They also needed to read the responses of others and give them a like/heart when they were finished reading. Over time, they became more experienced and then they responded to others with comments. Learning to give their peers positive feedback or ask a question if they didn’t understand the other student’s point of view was our next step. We had six #DigCit lessons, one each week for six weeks.
#SaferInternetDay2019
Our next step on our #DigCit journey was to get ready for Safer Internet Day. We developed a class pledge of the rules we felt were the most important. Students also created their own personal pledges for Internet Safety.
The combination of all these tools: Buncee, Go Bubble and NetSafe was a win for my students. Students got to interact with each other in a safe environment and experience a “Twitter Life Chat” to share their learning. Buncee was our creation tool for provocations, posters and pledges/promises for a safe internet. We had a global group to discuss our #IWill or #WeWill promises within GoBubble. This global collaboration involved children from Canada, the United States, and England. Students uploaded their posters into GoBubble as photo images and shared them to the world.
Buncee has been a favourite creation tool of my students and myself for the last two years. I create assignments and students create responses in Buncee daily. Buncee is continually adding new assets in the form of stickers, templates, different size canvases, 360 images, animations, and emojis. Being able to attached Youtube videos, links to other resources, draw and record your own video means that students have no need to go outside of Buncee when creating. Buncee remains our go-to application for every project, assignment or reflections.
Linda Edwards originally created her blog post in a Buncee. Click through below to view the whole thing:
Linda Edwards is a Special Needs Educator with the Toronto District School Board in Toronto. She is a Buncee Ambassador, Microsoft Innovative Educator and a GoBubble Ambassador. Connect with her on twitter at @LindaEdwardsi.
