A recent survey by CommonSense Media gives us yet another picture of the extend of social media in the lives of teenagers. This infographic – Social Media/ Social Life — gives a larger picture, but a few highlights for me: The prevalence not just of social media, but of Facebook, in particular, as the social […]
Search Results for: identity
Dear Librarian (at my son’s school): Remember the Books
Dear librarian of my son’s school, First of all, I want to thank you for being a librarian. I can’t think of a more important job. Your task is to place the right book in the right hands of the right child at the right moment, and when hundreds of kids are coming through […]
Slice of Life: Hanging out with Lil Bookworm, Da Boss, Mogo and More
Yesterday, my class began their work on designing t-shirts for our Quidditch team (our name is Permafrost). This is part of a collaboration with our wonderful art teacher, and they began on their shirts with the back. Here, they put their number (which helps the fifth graders on computers keep track of scoring data – […]
Usernames, Passwords and … me
I designed an activity the other day as part of our Digital Life unit that centered on passwords. We watched the Common Craft video about secure passwords (which was a hit as was the one about protecting reputations online) and used a site called How Secure is My Password, and then, the task before my […]
Shifting Student Identities in Online Spaces
(Taken from the CommonSense Media handout: Offline/Online Me) We spent our second day in our Digital Lives unit talking about identity. For my 11 and 12 year old students, this can be a pretty complex concept, particularly when we are thinking about how we make shifts in our personality and the way we want […]
My Students and their Digital Footprints
We just launched into a unit (a new one for me) around Digital Lives, which will cover such topics as safety, personal information, social networking, passwords and more. I am mostly adapting a great curriculum developed by CommonSense Media, which has some interesting videos, lesson plans and activities. Yesterday, I began by posting a huge […]
When the Imaginary Game is Passcode
I was working in another room yesterday morning when I heard my seven year old son, and our seven year old niece, making up some imaginary game. This is nothing new, and it is something we actively encourage. I sort of kept an ear out on what they were doing as I was writing and […]
Sharing the Page with Writers I Admire
I still can’t believe it. I opened up a package the other day and in it was a huge textbook, Modern Literature: Rhetorical and Relevant, and there, on page 505, is a graphic novel review that I did for The Graphic Classroom. The review is for the book After 911: America’s War on Terror, which […]
From Poetry to Collaborative Rap and Hip-Hop
I’m looking at my calendar and yikes, we’re almost done with the school year. We’re about to wrap up our unit around poetry this week and I often shift into songwriting for a day or two. This year, I might do something a little bit different. I am mulling over the idea of having each […]
My 2,000th Blog Post
I find it hard to believe, but technology never lies, right? According to my blog dashboard, this post is my 2,000th post that I have written and published here at Kevin’s Meandering Mind. Oh sure, I write in other places, too, but this is my digital home — the place where I see the most […]