Thank You Depew Middle School!

Yesterday, I presented to five different classes of seventh graders. At first, I was really nervous but as I kept going, I got better and warmed up to the students. I learned SO MUCH. After the first class I taught, I thought about how to make my teaching better. My mom and Mrs. VanEtten said that all good teachers do this every day. I really enjoyed teaching, but at the end of the day I was exhausted! I didn’t know until now how much work teaching is!

Mrs. VanEtten’s students are starting a research project. They are going to research ways to make a difference and then blog about it on their classroom blog. I think that this would be really fun to do, especially because lots of the kids are really interested in helping out and making the world a better place. They shared a lot of great ideas with me, and many of them have already done great service work. It was really inspiring for me to listen to them share the sorts of things they are doing or want to do.

I planned an activity where we all brainstormed what it meant to be a good citizen. Then, we talked about what a good digital citizen is. When we first started that activity, I showed this movie, which is funny. It told us how to stay safe on the internet, which is good, but I wanted to talk about digital citizenship, which is different. Everyone was telling me what NOT to do online, but then I encouraged them to tell me what we CAN do to be a good digital citizen. We know we SHOULDN’T spread rumors about people online in chatrooms or post personal information about ourselves, but do we ever think about what we SHOULD do?

Yesterday, I shared my idea that when we create safe places online where kids can learn together and accomplish things, we make the internet a better place. Mrs. VanEtten’s seventh graders were great to work with because they understand this and they are going to start trying too. They will blogging as they do their research paper. I used this Common Craft video to begin talking about blogging, and I got to share what I”m doing here too. I’m making some new friends there, and this is great.  Please visit their blog and leave them some comments if you haven’t already!

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