How I Plan to Effect Change

Although I fully intend to continue to 'impose' myself on my colleagues and plan on making some changes within my classroom. Yes, I will continue to seek out new and interesting projects, applications, and software, but I'm going to focus more on the Nine Themes of Digital Citizenship (I just happened across it in my Google Reader this a.m. and thought it was apropos to what we are discussing during our final module).

Yes, some of the themes are out of my control, but that won't stop me! I plan on focusing on Digital Communication, Digital Literacy, and Digital Etiquette. I've learned from past experiences that when you tackle new projects if you attempt to try to do it all you often end up doing none of it well.

Let's look first at Digital Communication and how this can be applied in the classroom. Our standard writing tasks fall along the lines of narratives, persuasive writing, how-tos, etc. I plan on taking these a step further and have my students start sharing more of their work with the global audience, rather than a site-based audience. In addition, I think it's important that we start looking at new types of writing and the conventions required, a blog post needs a different 'voice' from a persuasive essay.

Digital Literacy has always been woven into my instruction, but in the future I will be looking more closely at any hardware or application and see if it will truly support my goal of having my students more digitally literate when they leave my class in June.

Digital Etiquette is something I present on, but upon reflection I think I can do more within my own 2nd grade classroom. I think next year I'll start with a walled garden, such as Edmodo and have my students take risks, make mistakes, and learn within the confines of a safe environment.

As the school year comes to a close instead of being saddened by the departure of my students, I'm already invigorated by the prospect of what next year will bring to my class.