Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Student Digital Citizenship Symposium

This was a first for me.  I have used elluminate to join online PD sessions with over 300 teachers in them, but I have never done it with students.

The event was organized by Brenda Dyck with the Calgary Regional Learning Consortium.  Physically the event was hosted at the Calgary School for Girls but the virtual attendants included classrooms from around Alberta and the United States.  The topic, what does citizenry look like in a digital world?

The days started with a 90 minute panel discussion.  Members of the panel varied from the Mayor of Calgary to bloggers who have published books to students from the Calgary School for Girls. All facilitated by Dr. Alec Couros.

We had 3 students computers set up so that the students could add questions to the elluminate chat room. While the panel was excellent, watching a screen with a voice over made the students fairly restless.  At the first nutrition break we broke out the lap tops and set up Today's Meet for our own back channel. 

With our 15 laptops, student ipods and the open wireless, every student had a device and the change in engagement was amazing. (You can see the entire transcript of our back channel here)

The remainder of the day was broke into short presentations, a question for the class to discuss and post on a Google Doc and then back channel.  There were some great comments on what should be public and what should remain private, how easy it is to find information on the Internet and a number of ah-ha moments on the long term effects of sharing too much.  Our Google Doc can be found here.


To sum up the day students were asked to blog about what they learned at the Student Digital Citizenship Symposium. Being only their second time blogging, they would love some comments.  To add to the excitement of the day, students were sent home early because of inclement weather.  It was a crazy day.




Special thanks to Sandi Busch and her wonder 7A ELA class at Hythe Regional School.  A big thanks to Brenda Dyck with the Calgary Regional Consortium who let us in on this very interesting opportunity.  We are hoping that we can hold a Student Digital Citizenship Symposium - Northern Edition, in the near future.

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