With 21st century learning, digital citizenship is something our students have to learn. The digital lifestyle will always be with our students and it is definitely our responsibility to work in cooperation with parents to make sure we guide our students down a safe digital footprint.

Last year, my co-teacher and I introduced digital citizenship by having students work on a super hero comic book project. Making a super hero that may resemble them self and then building their comic based on a digital situation that students may face.

Well, our students are now 1:1, which makes it even more important to review safe cyber learning, but it also gives us more creativity to design projects with skills that the students can utilize back in their classroom. In the previous year during PARCC testing, my co-teacher had her students complete a digital story using a green screen and puppets. We thought this would be an interesting route to go having the students take classic fairy tales, but put a modern day twist on the story by involving a cyber safety element. The students loved this project!

With only seeing students 50 minutes, once a week, here is how we introduced it to classes:
*Prior to project introduction, students had a review on digital safety in class.
Week 1: We began class with a video, getting students hooked into the idea. From there, students made their own groups of 4 or 5 (I definitely wouldn’t recommend more than 4), and used Edmodo to review classic fairy tale stories that they may or may not be familiar with.
Week 2: Students were given a fictional story organizer, they worked in groups to complete their organizer on Notability or in Google Drawings. They then submitted their document through Edmodo for review and approval.
Week 3: Once their story was approved, students began collaborating on their script in Google Docs. Half of the group worked on the script while the other half began searching for images online to use for their puppets and background scenes. This is a great moment to introduce a mini lesson on image usage rights.
Week 4: Students continued working on their script/images. They were also provided materials that they could test their characters and scenes out with. Each group was given a: Green Screen (made of a display board and green paper), a white note card (for light testing), green straws to attach their characters to and a microphone. We had some old microphones in our lab that fit nicely into the iPads. My co-teacher thought of this as a way to help reduce noise in our small space since we were confined to all working in one room.
Week 5: Students began recording, we used the Veescope Live Free app on the iPads for our green screen.
Week 6: Students used iMovie to edit their film. They added tittle slides, background music, sound effects and credits. Great mini lesson on reviewing how to site sources!

Check our some pictures from our project experience!

Students planning their digital fairy tale

Green Screen recording