On February 2-5th, I was lucky enough to attend the edtech teacher iPad Summit in San Diego. 
Conferences are always so great--I love learning with new people and meeting some of my tweeps face-to-face!  I had a wonderful time and learned a lot.  My biggest take-away though, and one that I can see myself using with my students in order for them to authentically explain their learning, was on the concept of Appsmashing!  Check out the video below--it is my appsmash on appsmashing!

Thank you to the all the presenters, especially Shawn McCusker, Greg Kulowiec and Samantha Morra who helped me wrap my head around appsmashing! 

So, it is the last week of #ETMOOC and we have been talking about digital citizenship.  
How do we teach it? Model it?  etc...

And here is what I have been thinking about...I know we have to discuss what not to do with our students.  I do feel obliged to do that, I know I should say no online bullying, be careful, watch what you share, etc.  But, honestly, I don't really want to do that.  

I am not a negative person and I don't like focussing on life's don't lists.  I would much rather focus on the happier side of things.  I'd rather talk about the wonderful things we can do with social media, with our blogs and with the power of the internet.  And I want to focus on the positive behaviours and focus on what my students can do, should do, and will do! That is the discussion I want to have!  That is what I want them to brainstorm and share with the rest of the class, that is what I really think we ought to be focussed on!

Mother Theresa once said, "I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me".

I feel that same attitude can be applied to digital citizenship...I don't want to focus on the anti side of anything, I would rather focus on positive digital citizenship and gets students thinking and talking about the meaningful things we can do online...that gets me so much more excited than rambling on about what not to do.

What do you think?  Do we need to go through the consequences of negative behaviour?  Can we spend a little time on it and then focus more of our attention on the being good citizens.  

I would love to hear from you all about this!

Every couple of weeks, we get a new topic with #etmooc a recent one was about the meaning behind the buzz words like digital literacy, media literacy...you know what I mean...

I thought a lot about it...what does it mean to me?  And is it important?  And why?

And I realized that my whole transformation as an educator is because of my digital literacy.  Two years ago I began a quest to improve as an educator.  I wanted to take my teaching to the next level.  I thought that meant integrating technology and so that is what I aimed to do...I was going to be a fabulous teacher because I was going to do all kinds of awesome, techy things with my class!  I signed up for twitter, registered for the ITDA program at SFU and started this blog.  And amazing things happened.  I became more digitally literate, but more importantly, I met all of YOU -- I became a connected educator. 

And so, I think what I have come to realize, is that it is not digital literacy that makes us better and stronger educators (people?) but it is the amazing connections that we can now make because of our digital literacy that is really more important.  

Thoughts?