| Our second DigiLit meeting was interesting and fun. Our group created their own website mashups with Mozilla's X-Ray Goggles. We talked about credibility of online resources, learning to recognize a legit URL and thinking about creating and consuming online information. They took the plunge by mashing up an existing authoritative website from the Library of Congress. They all had great fun and demonstrated creative writing skills! We'll see them again on November 12th for our next meeting! |
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Ms. Craig's 6th Grade class experienced a new world of genre today in the media center. Students traveled though two of six stations to consume, analyze, investigate and interpret varying genre forms. They sorted poetry styles, selecting their favorite genre excerpt. Historical fiction took them on a journey through time around the world. They oriented their global position the old-fashioned way of pointing to the globe, then transferred the global location of the story setting to a desk map. They indicated the global location, major historical event and timeline in their passports.
In the folklore station, students learned about subgenres of Tall Tales, Legend and Myths. They watched a video about their specific folklore and identified elements in their story. The non-fiction station helped students identify purpose of the text: to inform, persuade or entertain. They often found multi-purpose text and defended their position to their teammates. The fiction genre station included a QR scan to videos explaining their elements. They noted the characteristics of realistic, fantasy, adventure and science fiction genres. The sixth station gave students opportunity to browse for books to add to their 40-Book Challenge wish lists. They are ready to read tomorrow for D.E.A.R. Friday and have plans to meet their reading challenges along the way. We had fun learning today!
Our orientation week is over! Students from all grade levels visited the media center to learn about our new policies and review the continuing policies. Sixth grade classes learned about all the areas of the media center and the variety of resources to help them with assignments this year. They had a QR scavenger hunt to find and scan six areas to learn about resource accessibilty and policies for using their learning commons. All students learned how to login on our network and enroll in their team Blackboard pages.
Seventh and Eighth grades used Thinglink to review familiar policies from last year and learn about some new things we're doing this year. Everyone is ready with a full resource toolbox to use this year. We'll see you soon at the WMS Library Media Center! What is coding? How did it begin? What possibilities are ahead in a coding career?
Today was the first DigiLit Club this year. We were very happy to welcome back a former WMS student, EB, to our new crop of WMS students interested in learning about digital literacy. Mr. West gave background information on the origin of HTML, Java and GUI as interfaces for developing the programs and online tools we use today. The group started their own coding practice with Code.org, watching a video of tech professionals talking about the realm of possibility that comes with code literacy. The group tested some game-like programming tutorials that used drag-and-drop methods of looping and building algorithms. Mozilla's Code Maven gave them experience using basics of Java scripting. Returning student EB talked about his experiences with DigiLit at WMS as one of the original club members. He explained his college and career interests in programming, then described the different methods he experienced through various self-guided tutorial programs. He helped out the newbies by guiding them though the basics of using Code Academy for building HTML and CCS codes. They had to read for instruction and build lines of HTML code in a step-by-step process. What? It's time to go? We will see you again on October 8th for Mozilla's X-ray Goggles. Bring a friend! |
AuthorSMike West, ITF |