Skip to main content

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21). 

I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class. 

We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online). 

One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom. 

All the templates for this challenge

Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was keen on the section of green faces but we liked the K-2 template where students listed what they did besides be online. I do have to say that I found several online examples of what people did with the faces that were clever (I searched Twitter #AdobeEduCreative to look over some samples other educators were posting).  

Adobe's Original Template

Our revised template

Our time with students in the computer lab was limited to one class period. Knowing it would take longer, I reached out to the homeroom teacher to see if I could come in the day before to explain the project and have them fill out a graphic organizer. 



We were lucky 5th grade had Related Arts the first period of the day (8:30 a.m.). The next day the homeroom teacher was happy to bring students to us early (8 a.m.) to get started. 

Ms. Himes, the technology lab teacher made her card to show students (see mine at the top). It was so good! She used the free'ish site Pixton to make a cartoon of herself (she is not a fan of having her picture taken) and used an online color palette picker for her color scheme. We would have loved to have given students the option of cartooning themselves but time was not on our side...but we did mentally file it away as a future possibility.


The first thing we had students do is open the template and share it with us so we could review and edit if necessary. Since we had deployed Adobe as a school district all our names and contacts are under the "share" and "invite" option. 

We asked them to type their words first, then insert their graphics, then take and insert their picture (students have 1:1 laptops with a built in camera feature with timer), and finally change font and coloring if they wanted. 

We had about five out of the 18 students complete it during the time we had them. Many were "nearly" done. The computer lab teacher and I, throughout the day, tweaked the finished ones (mostly for spelling and spacing) and helped to finish the nearly done ones. There were about eight that we needed to still work with. Luckily the school has WIT time at the end of the day and we were able to grab all but three during this time to finish. 

All in all the project took much more time then we thought. It was unlikely a regular classroom teacher would have devoted all the necessary time to it, in and amongst all the other things they have to do during the day. It is definitely something a technology or computer lab teacher could tackle over a few sessions. FULL DISCLOSURE: I had to return to the school two more days to catch the entire class since we had students absent. Normally I would have called the project finished but we were submitting the cards to be published by Adobe and wanted all the students represented. 

We were very happy they turned out so cute and the kids are excited about the possibility of getting them printed by Adobe. 

Check out this Facebook post of the student's hard work. If you wind up trying it with a class I would love to hear about your experience. Please comment below or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
13 comments
Read more

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&
5 comments
Read more

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more
Post a Comment
Read more