Getting Off to A Good Start w/ #EdTech: Consideration 2

You understand the important role technology plays in teaching and learning but want to make sure you are getting off to a good start. Whether you have been integrating tech for a while or you’re just getting started, it’s essential to ensure you have the foundation for success in your school or classroom.

To do this, you must ensure your students are digitally literate and they understand what it means to be good citizen not only online, but also, f2f.

Teachers, schools, and districts can achieve and be recognized for digital literacy competency by becoming certified. Common Sense Education has a high-quality K-12 curriculum available at no cost as well as a structured certification program. The curriculum covers areas such as privacy, security, safety, creating a positive digital image, cyberbully prevention, strengthening relationships, and copyright.

Find Common Sense Education Digital Citizenship resources at
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/digital-citizenship

Once your school is committed to ensuring students are digitally literate and responsible citizens teachers can get to the important work of ensuring they are creating the right environments to liberate genius in our students. Fortunately, Angela Maiers has written a guide that supports teachers in doing just that and gets you started with the first 20 days. What’s more, Microsoft has sponsored the guide so that it is available free-of-charge to educators.  In the guide you’ll learn about using Thrively, a tool that helps you discover how every student thrives by learning about their passions, talents, interests, abilities, and learning styles.  First step is discovering each student’s strength profile. This will help students learn about connections to possible paths to take for academic and career success and look at the best ways to get there.

To get your copy visit
http://www.choose2matter.org/liberatinggenius/

Read more all about it at Liberate Genius in 20 Days and Know How Every Child Thrives.

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This is part of a series in my conversation with author and professor Liz Kolb, who is teaching a course at the University of Michigan that addresses ways technology supports modern teaching and learning. Stay tuned on The Innovative Educator blog for the additional considerations in future posts. For a recap of all ten considerations visit https://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2016/10/essential-guide-to-modern-learning-10.html