Students Leading the Way: Sharing Apps

Today, I had the opportunity to catch a Periscope live broadcast of a group of students in Endwell, New York sharing out their favorite apps. The students gather information about their apps first in a Google Slide presentation, and then each student presented their rationale for the app they chose.

Without further ado, here is a link to tweet with the Periscope video available to view there.

LIVE on #Periscope: #Digcit App Smackdown https://t.co/ItQfBuSRPK

— Rachel Murat (@MrsMurat) November 10, 2016

You can also get an idea of the apps the students featured by looking through this Google Slide deck the teacher, Rachel Murat, shared: App Smashing


Here are three screen captures from the slide deck:

Here is a sample of the Google Form (survey) that was filled out to evaluate each of the apps presented. Students later created a blog post to support their top choice.

Overall, I was fortunate to watch the live presentation via Periscope to see the class in action and was impressed by the way the students took control of the learning, sharing their favorite apps with others and defending their choices as well as explaining how the app worked and its benefits.

Digital Citizenship Videos Created by Students

A few years ago, a social studies department chair, Paul Fitzpatrick, at Northwest Catholic High School, Connecticut, had his students lead the way in teaching one another about digital citizenship. At the time, he shared with me some videos his 9th grade Civics class produced for the unit of study.

Over the last couple of year, I have been teaching a course, Technology and Learning, to teachers enrolled in a Educational Technology Graduate Education Program. One of the themes of the course is Digital Citizenship. In an effort to encourage these teachers to have their own students lead the way in teaching about Digital Citizenship, I like to showcase the work of Mr. Fitzpatrick's students.

In the past, I have placed the videos in EdPuzzle for out-of-class viewing aligned with the Flipped Classroom model. This time around, I decided to share the videos, which are already publicly available on YouTube, thus therein with permission to insert them here.

Here are four of the videos.

Public Service Announcements (PSAs) , created by 9th graders, edited with iMovie

a) Bullying, Digital Citizenship

b) Identify Theft, Digital Citizenship

c) Prevention of Cyberbullying, Digital Citizenship

d) Plagiarism and Academy Integrity, Digital Citizenship

An additional recent example created by middle school students to promote kindness.

Your responses to any of the individual videos and to the concept of students taking the lead to communicate messages about Digital Citizenship are welcomed.