Month: November 2013

Lately, students in Division 7 have been making things and selling them for pretend paper money.  I decided this was a great opportunity for some money counting practice, so I am going to channel their enthusiasm into a class store.  Yesterday, students started making things they wanted to sell.  After making their creations they had to price them, and sell them to the store owner (me.)  I put a price tag on and students counted the money to put in their own wallet,  saving it for when the store opens next week.  Most students were very thoughtful about how to price their products, considering how much others would be willing to pay.  Already the store has quite a bit of stock, and we are looking forward to opening next week!

Last week we started learning a cyber-sense rap, which has continued into this week. Maybe you’ve heard parts of it at home!

As you can see it has lots of good tips for online safety. Today we created our own “cyber-me”s, also known as avatars. Students could choose to use doppelme to create a character, or kerpoof to create a drawing. An avatar is a great way to protect your privacy online, instead of having a photo of yourself. Our next step will be to create names for our avatars, making sure that they doesn’t reveal any personal information such as our real name, age, school, or where we live.

I am looking forward to putting all this learning together into a project to share. I think it is going to be really cool!

This morning we had a great introductory lesson to media literacy.  We started by defining media literacy, and then focused in on thinking about the internet.  We brainstormed good things and not so good things, and added our ideas to a Popplet.  I was quite impressed by what students already knew.

Next, we played Privacy Pirates, which taught us lots of ways to keep our personal information safe online.  The class was pretty smart about talking to a trusted adult if they weren’t sure about something online, but I think it surprised some of them that what you post online could be there forever, or copied by someone and shared another way.  The game has different questions each time you play, so this may be one you’d like to play again as a family.