Digital Citizenship (Tried It Tuesday and Techie Tuesday Link-up)

This year to teach Digital Citizenship I needed something new.  After looking at a variety of different sites I landed on Digital Passport by Common Sense Media.  This site grabbed my attention for a variety of reasons:

1. Students have their own login so I can track their progress
2. It has interactive games so the students are interested and have to make decisions
3. It can be used at school and at home
4. It covers a variety of topics
5. As a teacher I can group students by class
6. Even their lesson plans are great

As an educator you need to sign-up.  It is free and simple.  Once logged in you create your class(es) by typing students names in or uploading a simple .csv file. This is the screen you see when you first log-in.

As the educator you can download Educator Materials, these are the lesson plans which I find to be written well and very useful.  They are to the point, interesting, and a great introduction activity that help students grasp what they are about to learn. On this screen you can also Get Trained, find answer to some FAQs, learn about Mobile use on the iPads, or Preview the Games. I found the Educator Materials and Preview Games tabs to be the most helpful.

Here is a beginning of the Share Jumper Lesson Plan:

Here you can also change settings and view reports for your class(es).   By clicking on the class' tab at the top you can add more students, manage which activities they can play, and view their scores/reports.

So now it is the students turn to login.  (When I create student accounts at the elementary age I give them all the same password.  This makes my life easier in future weeks when students do not know their passwords.)   Students see this screen to login:

At their first log-in students are asked to choose an avatar and learn how to create a safe a password.  I learned that this is a test on following directions as much as it is on learning to create a good password.  Then they are brought to the following screen where they can choose their activities:

My students had mostly positive things to say so far.  I started with Share Jumper and I used Digital Passports opening activity.  They loved the game feel, their scores were good, and when we closed students retained information from the video, game, and scenarios played out for them.  While I will not do all 5 lessons this year, I will keep using Digital Passport and build on them each year.