Digital Citizenship and SAMR

First of all, let me say that my heart goes out to the people that were affected by the Valley Fire.  It has definitely been a trying time for our area.  For my school in particular, we were in school for four days and then had this last week off to accommodate safety precautions and for any displaced families.  While we have only been in school for less than a week (technically), I was very anxious to get started on my DALLA project of digital citizenship.  In a classroom where we very rarely use the typical worksheets and pencils, digital citizenship is a very important topic to me.   My DALLA (Digital Age Learning Leadership Academy) project is starting to make a bit of progress now that school has officially started.  In the first week of school we did one lesson on digital citizenship with a focus on "Safe Places to Go on the Internet."  As a class we discovered there were so many possible places for us to see and explore on the internet, but we also talked about some very basic rules.  #1 Always ask for permission #2 Go to the sites that are best for you and #3 Only talk to people you know.  This was a great way to start off teaching my students how to navigate on the computer in a safe manner.  The lesson itself comes from Common Sense Media (https://d2e111jq13me73.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/uploads/classroom_curriculum/k-2-unit1-goingplacessafely-2015.pdf) and gave the students some real experiences in dealing with the internet.  Our class all went to kids.sandeigozoo.org which offered a variety of activities for the students to participate in, including games, videos, live animal cams, and informational reading about different species.  We talked about how this is a safe place to go because it was given to them (my students) by their teacher (me), and they had all turned in internet permission that had been signed by their parents.  Later in the week, we had a little bit of free time to explore more on the computers using the internet and the students were given three different choices of sites to visit, one of which was the San Diego Zoo site.

Many of my students were able to take the information about being safe on the computer and internet and translate that to being safe in our neighborhoods and communities.  Already, I was able to see how my students are making connections between classroom and life experiences.  

As I think about this project so far, and bring it to the idea of SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition) I am beginning to see how to more accurately apply the idea of SAMR into  my own classroom.  This particular lesson on going to safe places seems to be a modification.  Students learned how to go to safe places (while talking about physically going places and how to act) and then got to try out a "new" way to go places by using their student Chromebooks.  While the idea of going to safe places doesn't change, the way we got there was much different than jumping on a bus and travelling to the San Diego Zoo.  My students seemed to have a great time navigating around on a website knowing that they could go wherever they wanted on the site.  The students were so excited about this lesson, they asked when the next digital citizenship lesson is happening.  Our next lesson focuses on searching based on the alphabet and will be happening this coming Monday!