What is an avatar? How, when, where, and why do people use avatars? These are questions 1st graders asked and answered as part of their Internet Safety curriculum. Then they created their own avatars using the website www.buildyourwildself.com Take a look at them here. Build Your wild self

This morning I am feeling extremely gratified with the responses from my kindergarten students to the question "What do you like most about coming to the library at Williams School? With the help of fifth graders this past June they used the app Scribble Press to illustrate and write their responses. We explored Mo Willems website and his Knuffle Bunny books and modeled our responses based on his style of writing and illustrating those books. I was just taking a second look at them and decided they were too good not to share with everybody. There's lots to do in the library! So here they are: What do you like most about coming to the library at Williams School?

This is the third year that I have used Common Sense Media's Digital Passport interactive program to teach 5th graders how to stay safe in the online world. Each year I get better at using it and this year I am hopeful to get through all five modules. We have completed Search Shark to help students improve their online search skills when they do research, and Evolve, which is the module that helps students understand cyberbullying and fight against it. This week we completed our third module, Mix and Mash. This module addresses creative credit in a really fun way. All the students were able to simulate creating a music video using online materials and citing their sources properly. They loved it! here are a couple of examples of what they came up with in this session. From Mr. Garlick's class From Mr. Lavigne's class

Overcoming Obstacles

Want to learn about some people who overcame obstacles and went on to make a difference for lots of other folks? Our fifth graders read picture books about these people and then used Thinkfinity's Character Trading Cards app to synthesize their information and create a trading card featuring the main character in their true life story. Then they imported their cards into the Educreations app where you can hear them tell about these amazing true life characters. Kudos to the fifth graders for collaborating to learn about the people, learn how to use the apps, and create these fabulous cards. Check them out!

Our fourth graders know how important it is to be responsible users of our technology. They shared what they have learned about being good digital citizens by creating posters using an app called skitch. Then we took the posters and used them as backgrounds in another app called Tellagami. Tellagami allows you to create short animated video. You can get your message across in a fun and quick way. Check them out at our Internet Safety Tips page. Tellagami is free for your iPad and you can learn more about it at tellagami.com

On Monday, January 20, we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday. This year our fifth graders remembered and honored Dr. King by viewing a video of his last speech in Memphis, TN on the night before he died. We thought about what Dr. King's message was that night. We answered the questions: What did the mountaintop stand for? Why do you think Dr. King felt that It would be OK if he did not get to the mountaintop? We wrote about it and then we took our work and created a collage with our thoughts and images of Dr. King using the pic collage app on our ipads. Please have a look at these. Click here for MLK posters.

In November of 2013 my colleagues, Erin Broderick, Jamie Lightfoot, and myself presented "Developing an Internet Safety Curriculum for K-5 at the AASL conference in Hartford, CT. In addition to outlining our curriculum, we have posted many free online resources that you can use with your students. The presentation is available here: Developing an Internet Safety Presentation