NCTIES2023

Our digital teaching and learning team has been hard at work building up the social emotional capacity to increase student achievement as well as create a safe space for dialogue to strengthen digital citizenship. Participants will investigate the Casel SEL Framework with a self assessment that they will apply to find direction in first steps to provide services and design experiences for students. I will share our school wide digital citizenship initiative that we have successfully implemented to truly connect students with authentic conversations to help students reduce digital drama. Our session will focus on digital life balance, conflict resolution, digital footprint, family dialogue and community support. In the past we have focused solely on anti-bullying tactics with technology, but have found that students needed more tools to be better digital citizens to have foundational life skills as productive members of our learning community. Attendees will leave the session with premade and editable resources that they can take and utilize in their school. My goal is to grow in this area in the coming years and having a network of attendees to learn and grow with will make our impact much stronger.

The STEM industry in North Carolina is a vibrant and constantly growing field. It experiences twice the growth of any other industry with a median wage of $94,810; this is 2.5 times greater than non-STEM jobs. Unfortunately, many of our students are unaware and/or unprepared for a career in such an upwardly mobile and impactful industry, especially girls and students of color. Enter SparkNC; a transformative initiative that strives to increase student preparedness for careers in highly technical fields like artificial intelligence, computer systems engineering, and cybersecurity. In this discussion-based session, we will share our approach to creating inclusive programs based on five design principles: (1) learner agency, (2) equity, (3) relevance, (4) connection, and (5) transformation. Through an interactive and collaborative process, participants will have the opportunity to discover new and transformative ways to engage all students in the career exploration process.

In this session, participants will explore how educational technology can be leveraged to support interpersonal, analytical, and cross-cultural student discourse through virtual exchange. Presenters from NC State University’s Friday Institute will define virtual exchange and share features of a 2022-23 virtual exchange between students and teachers at schools in Jiangsu Province, China and South Carolina, USA. Participants will engage in a cultural analogy activity in support of building a cross-cultural communications toolkit. Additionally, participants will be provided with a guiding framework for developing virtual exchanges and will discuss how a virtual exchange could be implemented in their learning contexts to support interpersonal, analytical, and cross-cultural student discourse.

This session will present data, research, exemplars, and resources that equip educators to incorporate positive digital citizenship instruction into their lessons.

Participants will engage in a sample lesson activity that incorporates subject-area material to show how this can be done as part of what is already happening in a class.

They also will be prompted with engagement protocols to reflect individually, with a partner, and in small groups throughout the session. With a partner, they will reflect on how to engage students in cultivating a positive digital footprint. Individually they will identify opportunities to integrate online resources to provide positive digital citizenship practice by promoting meaningful and authentic civic, social, or scientific engagement. In small groups, they will reflect on how to move from the urge to police to the challenging work of partnering with an emerging opportunity to reduce the imbalance between media consumption and media creation among today's students.

Make Your Own Copy of the Presentation Slidedeck: Digital Citizenship: Changing the Trajectory from Policing to Parnership

Digital Citizenship is not solely the responsibility of Media Specialists and Technology teachers, The NC Digital Learning standards require all teachers who interact with students in the classroom and use technology to teach and model NC DLS DC.2 This session will explore the North Carolina Digital Learning Standards and the indicators at each grade band (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12) specifically focusing on what it means to be a Digital Citizen. Keeping students safe online is vital but it is not the only goal of Digital Citizenship. Teachers need to understand the indicators and how to positively integrate them into their lessons in order to help students build the skills to think critically, participate responsibly and behave safely in a digital world.

Have you ever thought about creating a student tech team or help desk at your school? Do you have questions about how to start? Think about this…everyone has those students who always stop in because they are curious about what you do, or want to share their latest social media find, or just want to get out of going to class. This team can help find a place for students like the ones we just mentioned. Whether they are mechanical, creative, a problem solver, or interested in a career in technology, students can assist with and oftentimes know more about some of the issues we encounter every day. During this session, we will share our planning and implementation experiences and how they relate to the ISTE standards. Participants will be given a template to brainstorm the implementation process and needs for their particular school. Participants will also be able to collaborate with others and share ideas to make these processes easier.

Communication with the school community is very important, but we have to learn to communicate in ways that appeal to the way our community wants information. By creating pages on various social media networks, you can creative fun and effective mean of communicating information to your entire school community. In this session, users will be introduced to best practices for using social media as an educational professional and will have a chance to create a social media account and some content.

Digital Literacy skills can begin early. Students who learn to collaborate, communicate, and design begin to build portrait of a graduate skills.

NC recently defined their new portrait of a graduate competencies as: adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, learner’s mindset, and personal responsibility. These skills will help students thrive in a 21st century after graduate as they enter the workforce or higher education. It is never too early to start focusing on these competencies not just for graduation preparation but also for kindergarten readiness on through middle school readiness.

In this session join some of our STEAM and regular classroom teachers as we explore and try activities curated thanks to the Digital Learning Impact Grant that can be used to build these skills through coding. Join us to explore and try the activities we use to engage students in these skills starting in Prek and continuing all the way through elementary school. You will leave the session with access to our digital pacing for this work that includes alignment to the ISTE standards for students and portrait of a graduate skills. These activities can be integrated into the general classroom or the STEAM/STEM/Media class.

Beginning in our PreK classes as well as our community PreK outreach, the activities students engage with work to develop a common language and common questioning stems. As students move through the grade levels this consistent language is utilized both in the STEAM classroom and in the regular classroom to work through the design process. When students engage in these coding challenges with a group or partner they access collaboration skills that are so much more valuable than working in isolation by themselves. Most of the activities used require simple, readily available materials. Some activities require the use of various coding apps or robots that could be interchanged with any available robots or devices.

NFT depreciation got you down? Instead of teaching intellectual property licensing in the abstract, encourage students to generate and distribute their own intellectual property through website creation! Google sites provide a simple, accessible platform for student project generation.

I will spotlight one student website featuring a video she created to teach the world about her Karen (not Korean) culture. Through interviews with fellow Karen teens who are current or former refugees, a story of Karen culture and values emerges, as do reflections on the students’ experiences with childhood migration.

Once this student was fully immersed in her project, the details of how her emergent intellectual property might be used suddenly came into focus. Follow this student’s thought process in determining whether to use a standard YouTube license or an attribution-only Creative Commons license to protect and share her work. Learn about how other students made choices about how to license their photography, family recipes, etc.

I will also examine the links between culture and property, using themes from the student video about the differences between U.S. and Asian cultures, to show how intellectual property is a culturally dependent phenomenon, look at the historic and current relationship between libraries and rights holders, and bring us back to NFTs as a potential future of intellectual property.

Participants will listen to students share experiences and the processes taken to create a school-level documentary sharing the history of Central Middle School in Whiteville, NC, a historically black school, as it transitioned into a desegregated school. Primary sources, including former teachers and students were used in the video. The sponsoring teacher along with students as presenters, will then facilitate a learning experience with participants through a series of steps to create a documentary using a relevant and timely topic within the presentation. Participants will be given opportunities to use video recording devices, a green screen studio, online video editing tools, and a list of resources and possible topics to be explored by students in their respective school settings.