Digital Trails and Fearless Friday!

This week in our digital citizenship lessons, we focused on evaluating websites in three different categories.  There are green light sites, which are sites that are just right for you and don't require any personal information.  There are also yellow light sites that might mean you need to have permission from an adult to go there, but it is still a good site for you to view.  The final type of site is a red light sight, which is not right for you an any way.

Also, in digital citizenship we focused on what our digital trails and digital footprints look like.  We discussed how each new website you go to adds to your digital trail.  As a class we decided it was okay to have a long digital trail, as long as that included being safe online.  That means not giving out any private information such as your name, address, or phone number.  Personal information, like hobbies, are okay to share online if he doesn't reveal any private things about your life.  We heard a story of Mizzle the Mouse and Electra the Elephant.  Electra has a very long digital trail and wasn't careful about the type of information she shared online.  Mizzle has a shorter digital trail, even though she went to the same websites as Electra, because she didn't share any private information online.  As a class we talked about what our own digital trails look like.  Mine is a little bit longer because I am "older" and have "more accounts" on websites. :)  The class' digital trail is shorter and we always make sure to visit only green sites as a class.  Check out our visual that we created to show what different digital trails look like.

Today we had our weekly session of S.T.E.A.M. Friday (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics), which was a build-off lesson of our science from Thursday afternoon.  The class had a chance to "program" each other as robots moving through obstacles in our classroom.  We discussed what a program is and how it works cooperatively with a code.  The students created symbols that they thought would indicate to our "robot" how to move.  After figuring out which symbols would translate to code for the robot, they had to create a working code that would get our human robots from one side of the classroom to the other, while not bumping into chairs or other objects.  Here is what the class came up with for our robots, which we found was slightly different for each of the different robots (due to step size or even some tricky robots that really made us think quickly to change the code).

For S.T.E.A.M. Friday, the class had a chance to program and code on the Chromebooks in the classroom.  We used a website called kodable.com where the students had to program their "little fuzzies" to follow the code and complete each path given to them.  The class found at the beginning that the pathways were fairly easy to navigate and code, but as they continued through the different levels things became more difficult.  Not only were the students solving problems and figuring out the next step, but they were thinking critically about how to approach the whole problem.  There was definitely quite a bit of trial and error going on in the classroom, but everyone tried their best.  Eventually, the class found that even though the pathway might look hard it can be achieved through many trials.  Coding (or should I say, koding) in action!