Image from Common Sense Media
In Gr. 5, students are learning about copyright and creative common licensing when using images in their academic work. Students use digital images under the Fair Use category of copyright law, and are learning how to create hyperlinks in order to give credit to the source of the images they use in their work.
ISTE Standards 2c
Students demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.
Image from BrainPop
October 15-22 is Digital Citizenship week. Gr. 6 students are learning how to cite their information sources in Media classes this month. Students accessed information from three web sources, the CIA World FactBook, Country Reports and Wikipedia, and learned how to create citations in MLA style for these sites in a Works Cited page.
Students used our school’s subscription to BrainPop in order to learn more about the reason for citations and how using them is a demonstration of good digital citizenship.
ISTE Standard 2c
Students demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.
Image from Common Sense Media
Grade 4 students have been learning about digital citizenship in Media classes this month. Common Sense Education Digital Citizenship provides excellent curriculum materials for school and families, including entertaining videos like Super Digital Citizen (image above). What is private information? What information is personal? What information is OK to share online? The mascots from Common Sense media help inform young digital learners about their digital footprints, digital etiquette and online safety.
Digital Citizen 2a Students cultivate and manage their digital identity and reputation and are aware of the permanence of their actions in the digital world.
Digital Citizen 2b Students engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.
Last week in Media, all students were given the opportunity to explore the thousands of books available in our school library. Gr. 3 and new students learned how check out books and what our school’s Library Book Loan Policies are (see below).
If a parent or guardian objects to a book that their child has checked out from the library, they are encouraged to have the student return the book in the Book Drop Box the next school day and to check out a more suitable book.
Thanks to the time and effort of some terrific parent volunteers and staff members, over 10,000 library books were unpacked and reshelved since school reopened, and now the library is ready for students and staff!
The space is so bright and inviting, thanks to the installation of new lighting and a freshly painted and repaired ceiling. New carpeting was also installed. Next up, a new HVAC system on the roof.
All of these renovations and improvements were part of the new roof project.
Students have been having Library Media classes in their classrooms since the start of school while the library was being put back together.
Beginning Monday, September 18, students will be coming to the library for their Media classes.
Gr. 4 students continue to learn how to access and use various forms of information in our year-long National Parks research unit.
Students practiced using both the search engine and the menu features of the National Parks Service website in order to locate a free pass to the parks for all 4th grade students, a special promotion of the celebration of the National Parks 100th anniversary. Students then learned how to download the pass document to their Google Drive accounts. If your family has plans to visit a park soon, print out and use this pass and the whole family as well as any friends along for the trip get in admission-free!
In addition, students searched for information about the nearest non-historic National Park, Acadia, using the Menu feature. After viewing a video created by visitors of the park, students responded to a short answer assignment in their Media Google Classroom regarding the content and purpose of the video.
Massachusetts School Library Association Information Literacy Standards
1.8 Gather background information by reading, viewing or listening to a variety of pre-selected and self-selected resources.
2.10 Explain that there are different types of resources that can be used for different purposes: books, databases, periodicals, pre-selected class websites, reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclo- pedias, thesauruses, almanacs, etc.
In Term 2 Media classes, all Gr. 5 students participated in the Unit, “Read It or Weed It; The Fate of Merlin”. An essential element of maintaining a library collection is the process “weeding”, the culling out of books and materials that are dated and no longer popular with the patrons of the library. This task usually falls upon the Librarian. For this unit, Gr. 5 students played the librarian role to determine the fate of several fiction book series that were once, but are no longer, popular.
We began by creating a data table in Google docs of agreed upon criteria for which to assess the twelve books in the fantasy/adventure/mythology series of T.A Baron’s, called The Merlin Saga. Students browsed through the books themselves, referred to the author’s website and also read reviews of the books in Good Reads and Amazon Books for Children. Students then tallied up their total number of “read it” criteria and their total number of “weed it” criteria for one book in the series and entered these numbers in a Google Form. See the chart below for the grade level results and the Fate of Merlin.
As a follow-up extension of learning, students were then tasked with choosing the “fate” of one other fiction series from among 25 different series books in our library that are no longer circulating on a regular basis. Some series that students decided to “weed” are Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo and Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Two that were deemed still “readable” are Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carman and Vet Volunteers by Laurie Halse Anderson.
Massachusetts School Library Association Standard 3. Locate and Access Information – Students will be able to access and gather information efficiently and effectively.
American Association of School Libraries Standard 2. Learners use skills, resources and tools to draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations and create new knowledge.
“Survey research is often used to assess thoughts, opinions, and feelings. Surveys can be specific and limited, or they can have more global, widespread goals. … A good sample selection is key as it allows one to generalize the findings from the sample to the population, which is the whole purpose of survey research.” (Wikipedia)
Grade 6 students have been creating and taking surveys with their classmates using Google Forms and Google Classroom.
Star Wars Survey by Madeleine Payne, Ms. Stewart’s class
Once the surveys were taken, and students received the results, each student analyzed the results of his/her survey using Google Sheets.
Students asked the following questions in their analysis.
“Did my survey give the results I had expected when I created the survey?”
“What would I do differently with my survey now that I have seen the results?”
“How could I “tweak” the survey to get different results?”
Students then revised their surveys for their classmates to retake and noted both the difference in the results and their explanation for the difference.
Massachusetts School Library Standards
|
5.7 |
Use appropriate medium to produce an original product to communicate research results. |
7.9 Review and evaluate the process of transforming information into knowledge.
Is it OK to use Wikipedia for school projects? Students in Grade 5 are finishing up a unit in which they discussed the the pros and cons of Wikipedia as a source of information for school work. Students concluded that each teacher will have his/her own policies regarding the use of Wikipedia and that in general practice, “Wikipedia may be [sic] a good place to start, but a bad place to finish.”
From a video by Imagine Easy Solutions
MSLA Standard 4a. Evaluation Information for Appropriateness. With assistance, develop criteria for relevant information, including authority, accuracy, objectivity, relevancy, and currency of source.