Nine year old Dalton Sherman addresses the Dallas ISD… “Here’s the deal: I can do anything, be anything, create anything, dream anything, become anything — because you believe in me, and it rubs off on me….In some cases, you’re all we’ve got.”
Schools do so much formal planning to try to make learning happen. Charting standards, writing tests, rewriting tests, creating pages and pages of documents to record learning, developing lengthy lists of standards that are covered and recovered. Writing what is being learned on boards and walls. Then, people in tiny offices across the state judge us on a score. They try to reduce learning to a number. Developing point scales to check what has been learned and what is to be learned. So much. It’s so formal. So expensive and so time consuming.
Then? A kid goes into yard and blows a bubble and asks, “Why does it pop?” “What will happen if I poke a stick into it while it’s growing?” “How come some of the bubbles stick together?” “Is the bubble strong enough to carry a caterpillar away in the wind?” An exploration of surface tension, gravity, spheres, and air. It’s informal, but it’s real. And it’s free. Discovery doesn’t cost a dime. Okay, the bubbles were a dollar. The time? It was well spent. Because real, authentic wonder and learning? It’s priceless.
There are lots of things we cannot control. Sometimes absolutely zero control. People who aren’t in education for the right reasons. Testing mandates. Kids’ troubled home lives. The media’s portrayal of schools. Poverty. Kids dealing with survival over learning math. Budget cutbacks, and then more budget cutbacks. Feeling unsupported by the world.
But there are things we can control.
The way we treat children when they’re with us for the day. The connections we build with our kids. The daily lessons we shape. The story we share that’s our story. The photos we post on our blog. Modeling digital citizenship for our kids. Creating global connections in our schools. The comments we spread through social media and open dialogue. The message we share and live. Reaching out to support others who might not be feeling supported. The way we treat our colleagues every single day. Getting learning out of the textbook and lighting fires in kids’ minds by helping them see just how amazing the world really is. Things we can control.
Above all? We can control what we see when we look at a situation. Education. Do we see a hopeless outcome where it all seems lost? Where the bureaucracy creates some kind of cloud of doom? Or, do we see education is not hopeless. In fact, it’s so full of hope that it’s busting at the seams.
That hope? It’s in the kids we teach.
Our kids come into our classrooms each day and go home to a world where they are surrounded by technology. I could make “Do not copy or paste from the internet” a classroom rule. Or, instead, I could address questions like the ones below. From the time my youngest students, 3rd graders, start in my classroom we begin digital citizenship. It’s not about my rules of what they can and cannot do. It’s about their understanding of the proper way to handle life in a digital world and every year we build on this.
Here are ten questions to get your class started. Just begin with one. Get the discussion going. Ask kids to think critically about online sources. Work these conversations into your language arts persuasive writing, into your science research, or even into social studies in looking at National Archives photos. Integrate digital citizenship into your classroom the way it’s integrated into our daily lives.
1.) Is Google a source?
2.) How do I know if a website is reliable?
3.) Can I use anyone’s photo in something I create?
4.) If I write something online, what’s the best way to delete it from the internet?
5.) How much does my digital footprint matter?
6.) If I draw a photo and post it online and someone else downloads and sells it, is that wrong?
7.) Is it okay to copy and paste someone else’s work? Why?
8.) What if I wrote a blog post and someone copied it and sold it? Is that fair?
9.) Is every photo online real? How do you know?
10.) What do you think of Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “The trouble with the quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are genuine”?
These are skills that we’ll feel like we don’t have time to teach or can wait one more year. But, these are skills that we just can’t afford not to teach and model on a daily basis.
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Currently an Innovation Coordinator at The Kinkaid School. I get to play, innovate, and support teachers and kids in learning. Know that saying, "Do what you love"? Yep.
