Digital Literacy and Citizenship in the Classroom

digital citizenship with Common Sense

In our rapidly evolving digital world, it’s crucial that students develop strong digital literacy and digital citizenship skills. From navigating the internet safely to understanding the capabilities of artificial intelligence, our students need guidance to become responsible and informed digital citizens. That’s why incorporating Common Sense Media’s free educator resources is such a valuable opportunity for all educators.

Common Sense Media provides ready-made lesson plans and lesson collections tackling a wide range of relevant digital topics like digital security, managing digital distractions, and understanding AI. By creating a free account, teachers gain access to these amazing materials designed to build digital literacy in an engaging way. As educators, we have the chance to empower our students with the knowledge and skills required to thrive online. Bring Common Sense Media’s lessons into your classroom to prepare your students for success in our digital age with confidence.

lesson collection on digital well-being
Digital-well being lessons are available across grade levels.

 

lesson collection for elementary device advice
Lessons to foster device use in the classroom.

 

Range of lessons for 10th grade
Digital citizenship lessons can fit in a variety of subject areas.

March Madness for your Classroom

march madness

The fun surrounding college basketball’s March Madness can be translated to your classroom content. By using the bracket students can discuss and compare ideas. One tool, Flippity, stands out as a great option for customizing your own bracket for classroom use.

See Eric Curts’s blog post for step-by-step directions for set up and ideas for how you might use it in different content areas.

If you like the ideas of students discussing and ranking concepts, but don’t want to get swept up in March Madness, you can check out Eric’s Tier List activity and template.

March Canvas Updates

march Canvas updates

March 16, 2024 Canvas is releasing two welcome updates!

  • New Quizzes Item Analysis: Fill In the Blank Data now provides additional information on specific question types for instructors to evaluate student responses and provide appropriate intervention. Previously, if you had multiple blanks or dropdowns you would not get stats on all the blanks. Now you will be able to get data for each blank. See image below.

fill in the blank analytics

  • Multiple gradebook filter options can be applied at once.

gradebook filters

Video walkthrough:

Canvas Discussions Redesign Coming this Summer

canvas discussions redesign

This summer, Canvas is rolling out a redesign of the Discussions feature to provide a more modern, accessible, and user-friendly experience. While the core functionality of Discussions will remain intact, the new redesign brings a host of exciting enhancements.

What’s New in the Discussions Redesign?

  • Cleaner, more accessible UI with improved screen reader capabilities
  • Flexible viewing options including inline view and split view
  • Reply reporting with notifications for instructors
  • Quoting functionality to make referencing easier
  • Improved search with text highlighting
  • Support for full and partial anonymity in graded discussions—this functionality is currently turned off  for P-CCS until Canvas adds a moderation feature
  • Additional sorting and filtering options

The goal is to facilitate better peer-to-peer interaction and collaboration through a modernized discussion forum experience. Popular existing features like posting before seeing replies, marking posts read/unread, group discussions, peer reviews, and rubric support will continue to be available.

While some may be apprehensive about the changes, Canvas emphasizes that no current functionality is going away. The redesign aims to elevate the overall discussion experience by adding conveniences like quote replies, anonymous postings, and a more intuitive design.

So get ready to embrace the future of Canvas Discussions coming your way this summer! The refreshed interface and new capabilities will foster more engaging discourse for students and instructors alike.

Find more information here: 2024_Canvas-Discussions-Redesign_Data-Sheet.pdf – Google Drive