4th Grade Internet Safety- Digital passport Summaries

In January and February, 4th graders completed the following Internet Safety lessons:
Communication: Twalkers- Students learn why it's important to avoid multitasking with a cell phone. They consider the benefits of focusing on one task at a time.

Family Tips

Privacy: Share Jumper- Students evaluate examples of online messages. They decide what information is appropriate to share and when. Students are also reminded that nothing is truly "private" or "erasable" online.

Family Tips

Cyberbullying: E-Volve- Students make choices about what to do if they or their friends are cyberbullied. They are encouraged to "evolve" into an “Upstander” – someone who takes action to stop cyberbullying, rather than standing by.

Family Tips

Search: Search Shark- Students learn how to choose effective keywords for searching online. They practice selecting keywords that are most relevant to a search prompt. Along the way, students discover hints for narrowing their search results.

Family Tips

Creative Credit: Mix-n-Mach- Students remix media content to create a new creative piece. Along the way, they give proper credit to the artists whose images and sound clips they use.

Family Tips

5th Grade Digital Passport Parent Materials

All 5th graders have now completed two Internet Safety lessons- one on cell phone use and another on cyberbullying.  The next lesson will be on copyright law.

The digital passport site has the following resources available for parents:

Communication: Twalkers (proper cell phone use, multitasking, and distraction)
Cyberbullying: Evolve (cyberbullying, targets, upstanders, bystanders, and bullies)
Creative Credit: Mix-N-Mash (copyright law, plagiarism, and giving credit)

ATS Picks 10/22/10

1) New iLife features

See the new features available in iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand. The new lessons for guitar and piano, and the new guitar amps and effects look pretty cool. And if you purchased a Mac recently, but don't have iLife '11, you can get iLife '11 for just the cost of shipping and handling instead of the full price (details are on the webpage).

2) CNN: Will physical books be gone in 5 years?

Washington (CNN) -- As e-book readers and tablet computers become more common, one prominent tech mogul says that physical books could disappear sooner than expected. In an interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz on "Reliable Sources," author Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, said the physical book's days are numbered.

3) Copyright-Friendly and Copyleft (mostly!) images and sound for use in media projects and web pages, blogs, wikis, etc.

Most of the media in these collections are attached to generous copyright licensing. Though you may not need to ask permission to use them when publishing on the Web for educational purposes, you should cite or attribute these images to their creators unless otherwise notified!



4) Michael Wesch BLC10 Keynote Speech

Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.

5) The "In B Flat" website is a compilation of YouTube videos all embedded on one page. Each one is a musical (or spoken word) performance. You can start playing several of the videos to have an interesting effect. It would be interesting to replicate this as a lesson for music class.  ~Demetri