Vokis Can Bring out Student Creativity

(this piece was also posted at: Voki Guest Blogger/)

I still remember the first time I was introduced to Voki, I was at a tech conference. The presenter was showing a number of different fun, new, tools, but Voki stole the day. Honestly, I can't remember the next 20 minutes of the presentation because I was so busy having fun playing with Voki, recording myself, giving myself new outfits, sending emails back to my boss saying things like "Vokis are so much fun!" I was immersed in learning the new tool and practicing my digital literacy and fluency. It is the same for our students.

Voki opens up a world of hands-on creativity for your students.

Show any classroom of students Voki, and you will immediately see them trying it out in a myriad of ways. I had the pleasure of joining a student tech club after school one day and I did a quick demo of Voki. The teacher and I had a plan that they would use their Vokis to introduce themselves to me (a visitor for the day) and then we would share what each student did. It was a nice plan, and the students would have done it. But we quickly realized, we had set the bar way too low, these kids had more ideas about what they wanted to do!

Voki lets you have your Voki speak in several languages.

Some students immediately started playing with the language feature of Voki. While this tech club is in a richly diverse school, where many languages are heard every day, these students still had a great time listening to phrases spoken in languages they had never heard before.

Voki allows you to re-record until you like how it sounds.

Some students probably practiced what they wanted to say 5-7 times before they saved their Voki. This repeated practice is fantastic for English Language Learners and other students working on their oral language skills. Asking a student to re-read passages can be tiresome, but ask them to make a Voki and they will repeat the passage until they like how it sounds, over and over again.

Voki lets students play around with identity.

Let's face it, not all students are pleased with their self-image. I've seen students change their avatar dozens of times to find a "look" that they want to project. Don't overlook the importance of this! As students travel the weary path of adolescence and pre-adolescence, they crave opportunites to try on different looks and personas. Using Voki to do this is a safe and fun way to change your hair color, add an earring or see how a British accent sounds. Letting students play with these avatars as they complete a content-based assignment is as developmentally appropriate as free play in Kindergarten.

Voki is a great way to discuss Digital Citizenship.

Our students might not need our guidance when it comes to figuring out how to make a Voki, but they do still need our guidance about what makes a good and appropriate Voki. Voki is a fun way to get students talking about what make a quality presentation. If the assignment is to have an Abraham Lincoln Voki talk about three of the most important parts of his presidency, showing him with sunglasses on isn't the best way to convey your message. Likewise, students should never use Voki to share too much information about themselves or to embarrass others. It is imperative that we have these conversations with students and why not do it with a tool they love!

Voki can be used in any classroom:

Science: Make a Voki to explain the outcomes of a lab. (I've seen students do this for their Science Fair presentations!)
Social Studies: Choose a Voki of an historical figure and have them give three important facts about their lives.
English: Make a Voki that represents a character from a novel. Have them "saying" the theme of the novel.
Math: There is a lot of vocabulary in Math. Have a Voki provide definitions for key terms.
World Language: Provide a description of a person in the target language, see if the students can make a matching Voki.
Physical Education/Health: Let a Voki give facts about staying fit and healthy.

To get the most out of Vokis, make sure you give your students time to play when making their Vokis, you'll be surprised with the results!

"Ask yourself, would you do this offline?

This isn't the tagline from a digital safety website, this is a submission for a new laptop background from a 6th grader at my school. Each 6th grade submission was full of great advice like this. Reading these submissions was so satisfying because it was clear that kids now understand a great deal about what is and what isn't okay to do when online.

I was thrilled that my school elected to spend 4-5 lessons of an advisory period on digital citizenship. Digital citizenship has become more and more important to me as I've watched my own children experiment and explore digital media and as I see more and more teachers using Web 2.0 and social media tools in the classroom.

I am a tech geek so I am excited about the digital world our children and our students can explore. The possibilities for young people to impact the world and to leave a positive digital footprint are unlimited. But we also know that there are many misteps along the way as well. Many a student will upload a silly-to-the-point-of-gross YouTube video of themselves or leave a comment that they think is funny but is actually hurtful. So we need a chance in school to get them thinking and reflecting about what online posting is all about. These 4-5 lessons were a great start.

We wanted a curriculum that was developmentally appropriate and that would loop each year, exposing all students to important topics each year of middle school. Sixth graders would study Internet scams and cyberbullying. Seventh graders would consider copyright and fair use issues in a unit called "Yours, Mine or Ours?" Eighth graders would delve into the murky world of social media and discuss what staying safe online really means. We were able to adapt all of our lessons from Common Sense Media, an organization devoted to educating and advocating for sensible use of today's media.

Common Sense Media's K-12 curriculum was the perfect starting point for our lessons. They had great activities and resources for the kinds of topics we wanted to pursue. We adapted the lessons to fit our time and format and then referred teachers to the website if they needed more ideas or information. Teachers appreciated having the lesson materials and kids liked the updated and relevant activities.

But what I really loved about our units were that each one ended with an authentic assessment. The 6th graders were asked to design a laptop background. The top winners across the school will actually become the background of our school computers next year!

The 7th graders produced "Creator's Checklists" - a list of items students should consider when creating with digital content. Again, the best examples will be used to make a creator's checklist that will become part of the published student agendas for the next school year. That's right, the best checklists will actually be printed in the student calendar/resource that every students carries around every day, all year long!

And finally, our 8th graders were asked to make Public Service Announcements (PSAs) about staying safe online. Now, I have to say that asking 8th graders to take on a task like this in the spring was a major challenge. I am looking forward to moving this digital citizenship unit into the fall for next year when I think we'll get much better responses. *smile*

I am really proud that the staff and the administration at my school understood that we needed a systematic approach to teaching digital citizenship at our school:

• lessons that every student were exposed to,
• tasks that were engaging, relevant and authentic, and 
• materials that any teacher could use and that any students could understand. 

If these desktop background submissions are any indication, our kids have learned a lot about how to be digital citizens now!

The Making of Digital Citizens

What a rich discussion we had last night during Session #3 of the Virtual Book Club! If you weren’t able to join us, listen to the recording here: Virtual Book Club Feb 4th/5th and please share your thoughts on this blog: Virtual Book Club. We have been reading and discussing Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis  and our focus this time was Chapter Five (Digital Citizenship) and Chapter Six (Contributing and Collaborating).

We confessed, bragged, questioned, shared tips and traded resources on the topic of Digital Citizenship. It seems there is always more to consider from using images in our presentations to setting our privacy settings but we all agreed that we need to model strong digital citizenship for our students and explicitly teach them how to be a thoughtful contributor in the digital world.

• Connie shared "Just as we model and teach ways to effectively present and collaborate in face to face groups, digital citizenship is just another layer."
• Joseph agreed and asked, "Students need to understand that there are differences in communicating on facebook, twitter with friends versus using this type of media in school...but how to teach?"
• Elena commented, "It[digital communications] also provides an opportunity to evaluate how we interact with each other face to face. Sometimes in the middle school environment, speaking to others with a certain tone or attitude can become the norm."
• Amy agreed, "Not only do we need to relate to our students using technology but we need to teach them how to communicate in positive ways using technology"

Some of the great resources that were shared to help with teaching digital citizenship were:

• For images: Creative Commons, Pic4Learning, MorgueFile
• For music: Royalty Free Music, Free Play Music, Sound Bible
• For teaching about Digital Citizenship: Common Sense Media, Digital ID, Read. Write. Think.

Some tips given about getting students to care about digital citizenship:

• Use real-life examples (read Chris' story here) and facts (thanks to Laurel for sharing that 70% of employers look at digital footprints)
• Have students create Digital Citizenship materials (Digiteen and Digital ID are examples)
• Provide an authentic audience (when students see that others are actually reading/listening/watching their work, they care more)
• Make it easy for students - provide them with music and images that they can use
• Model by adding the URL for photos within classroom presentations
• Use your librarians! They often have lessons ready to go on this topic
• Start with a private wiki or an Edmodo class where you can monitor and give feedback to students before collaborating with another classroom.
• As Rocky has done, actually contact authors and artists to request permission to use their materials. (Read more about what Rocky has done here)

We wrapped up by sharing a bit of advice about getting started with global projects and we all got really excited about trying Mystery Skype. And, as usual, the time flew by. I never knew an hour could pass so quickly!

A huge thank you to Vicki Davis for joining us in between prom planning and Flat Certified teacher training. Your professional generosity is unending. Another thank you to Jim for picking up as co-moderator. It is so helpful to know someone else is listening, reading, typing and talking as fast as I am! And a thank you to all the busy educators who took time out to share, question, and connect.

I'm looking forward to our next meeting on Monday, February 18th at 7:30pm EST (that’s Tuesday, February 19th at 3:30am GMT). For your time zone, click here. We will be discussing Chapters Six (Choice) and Seven (Creation).

Website of the Week #1

Hoping to make this a new habit. There are so many great websites out there that I often forget what some of the great ones are! I am hoping that by posting just one a week (I'm also email blasting my teachers these) I will be able to share some great resources, remind folks of great resources, and have a nice catalog of some of my favorite sites when I want to put together a presentation or just make a recommendation to a colleague. And my hidden agenda is that maybe this will get me posting to my blog more often. :) So here is the inaugural....

Website of the Week #1

http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Tired of students going to Google for all their research? Try SweetSearch: http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Sweet Search uses only the 35,000 Websites that their staff of researchers, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved. This helps students find good information faster. Consider recommending this site to students for all their research!

Have you had good luck using Sweet Search? What do students think? Would love to hear your stories!

We finally got to start using Quest Atlantis last week! If you have never heard of Quest Atlantis before, it is an immersive learning game. Students have avatars and enter a 3D world where they are assigned missions and quests. The missions and quests all are connected to real-world problems and have engaging story lines. Students must navigate the 3D world to find information and clues to solve a problem. Along the way they meet virtual characters who guide the students and provide information. There is also the opportunity to interact with the avatars of students from other schools. The basis of Quest Atlantis is the concept of transformative play. As the Quest Atlantis website explains:

Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and the player.

So, I was curious, how would my students react to this 3D space? Would they experience tranformational play? Would they enjoy exploring the virtual world more than they enjoying learning in a traditional classroom?

Honestly, I wasn't sure I would ever find out. The first hurdle to tackle was getting permission slips signed. Because Quest Atlantis is funded by Indiana University and used for research about emerging technologies and learning, students were required to have parental approval before logging into the Quest Atlantis world. Unfortunately, asking parents to sign a permission slip for a class assignment was not a top priority for these students. After a little cajoling from me and some tough talk from their principal, we finally had all the permission slips in. Whew, step one complete.

The first day playing went, well, great. The students were excited. They were laughing and talking and fully engaged for the 30 minutes we let them play. It was fascinating to watch their personalities emerge online. Some went right to finding out their mission and were running off here and there without really absorbing their task or the information given them. Others spent a tremendous amount of time getting their avatar just right. Still others tested the limits of the world and immediately dove off cliffs, swam in the water and tried to get into places they shouldn't. It was all behavior I would completely expect when giving adolescents a new toy. They were experimenting: some with recklessness, some with caution and some just took it as it came.

Day two we began by showing students how to know where in the 3D world they were. Quest Atlantis uses North, South, East, and West indicators for students to know where they currently are and to locate the places they needed to get to. I was pleased that students got the directional concepts but was fascinated to watch them play and realize that they didn't really understand how to apply these concepts. Since we were playing during their social studies class time, I loved that they were absorbing directionality in a whole new way and actually applying it in a way that was meaningful to them.

My other take-away from day two was that my students need help following directions! I guess I always knew that but assumed that they were having trouble following directions because they didn't really care about the assignments or weren't listening to the directions the first time. But watching them play Quest Atlantis, I realized they actually needed help reading carefully and doing tasks in the order assigned to them. Since many of my students have struggled to achieve in traditional schools, this observation wasn't a shocker, but it was still useful to observe it in the virtual world.

The next step with Quest Atlantis will be for the students to tackle content-related missions in the 3D world. Until then I'll be excited about the following things:

• The school administrator commented that she'd never seen Student X talk so much as she did when playing  Quest Atlantis that first day
• A student that was going to be absent for Day Two asked if she could play the game at home. (Yes!)

If playing Quest Atlantis means students are excited to learn and want to work on school work outside of school, I'm ready for more!

Save the Pacific Tree Octopus!

We have all heard the dire predictions about the Internet making students dumber. I bristle at these accusations; the medium through which students access information has very little to do with their intelligence.  And this is the wrong focus anyway, as it’s not about being smart or dumb; it’s about becoming a strong critical thinker. And what’s needed to do that is teachers and classrooms that get students to think more deeply about what they read, whether it be a book, a newspaper article, a website, a viral video, or even an encyclopedia. Students have always needed help being critical readers and critical consumers.

This is why I love lessons that get students thinking more deeply about what they see and read on the Internet. A teacher that I am lucky enough to work with developed a brilliant and simple lesson that could be used in a number of different subject areas and across different grade levels.

Here is what Mrs. D did:

1)      Have students go to a website that contains false information. There are a number of great sites that do this well. One of the most engaging (and amusing) is the Pacific Tree Octopus website. This website contains great graphics, links to YouTube videos and convincing pleas to help the “endangered” Pacific Tree Octopus.

2)      Ask students to take notes on some basic facts about the subject of the website. Mrs. D. asked students to record important information about the Tree Octopus and then discuss with a table partner.

3)      Have students compare what they learned on the first website with a site that is edited like World Book Online or Britannica Encyclopedia. Mrs. D.’s students were very confused when they went to the World Book Online and couldn’t find anything about the Pacific Tree Octopus. At first they thought they hadn’t typed the term in correctly, then they were concerned that World Book Online must not have complete information. Students were not yet suspicious about that cute little Pacific Tree Octopus.

4)      Ask students to try a second site to confirm the information from the fake website. Mrs. D.’s students were relieved when they saw that Wikipedia had an entry about the Pacific Tree Octopus. However, on closer reading, the students realized that the Wikipedia entry referred to the Pacific Tree Octopus as a hoax. This is the fun part of the lesson. Students all react in different ways. Some laugh, some are mad, some tell you that they knew all along. Teachers should be ready for all of these reactions, but should also be clear that the original site was a fake.

5)      Ask students why they believed the Pacific Tree Octopus was real. Mrs. D. was shocked by how her students answered this question. Students replies included:

“It was on the Internet”

“You could give money”

“I saw one before” (my personal favorite, we have all taught this kid, haven’t we?)

“There was a video”

“There were pictures”

“There was such detailed information”

6)      Revisit the lesson with students the next class. Mrs. D. asked students to recall what they learned from the Pacific Tree Octopus lesson the next time they came to class. Students shared insights along the following theme:

“You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet”

What I love of Mrs. D.’s lesson is that it isn’t drawn out. It doesn’t take long to do. It is repeatable. Any teacher can do it. Schools could easily repeat the same lesson with different websites year after year until the message becomes crystal clear to the students:

“You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

Someone who has done excellent work on this topic is Donald J. Leu of the University of Connecticut and his New Media Research Team. Dr. Leu and his team are working to collect research about the reading comprehension skills needed to be a successful reader in the 21^st century. Furthermore, they are investigating how to best support students in order that students may become thoughtful and informed users of Internet information.

If you are looking for similar websites that could used in the same way, here are some good ones. I have also created a Diigo group called Critical Literacy Resources to collect more. Please feel free to join and suggest your own. Or leave a comment below about similar lessons or lesson ideas you have.

Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division - beware of exposure to this chemical!

All About Explorers - did you know Christopher Columbus was actually born in Australia?

Martin Luther King Jr. – A True Historical Examination Much more serious site for examination of bias and deception. This website is hosted by David Duke's foundation. Suitable for middle school and high school students with careful preparation and debriefing.