Communication has evolved. There's no way around it. As an educator and a 'technologist', I can't help but continually think how to integrate technology into my lesson on an elementary school level. One particular lesson is how to communicate and interpret online communication. Elementary students are already learning about how to interact with each other in real life. This can be challenging, and adults/mentors are usually always close by to facilitate this and help them understand things that happen in the most plain of terms 'by accident' or 'on purpose'. Add the internet and you have now taken away facial expression, and put the person reading the message in control of the overall tone. Tonality plays a big role in reading and writing. The author will convey the character dialogue by using descriptors to help the reader interpret how to understand the character point of view. Emoji's in online or text communication can also have an important role in this. Conversational dialogue is a very different kind of writing from your more traditional short story, poetry, or non-fiction writing. Emoji's can help a student understand that the message was sent was a 'happy' one, rather than meant to hurt someone's feelings. Typically you won't see the indicators on how to use proper infliction to interpret your text in an online or text conversation. It's entirely up to the reader, which in a child/tween/teen case, can cause an issue. A discussion about this kind of communication between friends needs to happen, but also, so does monitoring. When I teach online communication, it is with a fully-monitored platform and the discussion is guided. Because this may be one of the first platforms to which they are communicating with fellow students with, before they post, they are informed that Mrs. Pietrocola will be reading the message before I post it to the class. Therefore, if they can't say it to me, they most likely shouldn't be saying it to the class. We create a class rubric. It can be as simple as: what is to be considered
Next, give students 3 post-its. Have students write their first 'post' On a post-it! Then, have them walk the room and leave a 'post' on another students comment. You can now do a quick evaluation and compare and discuss the students comments. Now you are onto the actual online part. When introducing the online platform one fun activity can be to create your profile. I posted this profile picture, which is my 'personal' one because I recently was finding myself editing the 'bio'. As I did this, I ran into the problem that I wrote too much information in my biography. Then, google inspired me as it suggested a few of my favorite emojis. The saying, "a picture says a thousand words" is more than applicable. I had fun with this searching for different emojis that tailored my interests; I even discovered emoji's that were unavailable. I immediately realized how much fun this would be for the students. Make sure you have a conversation about all the emoji's: discuss that you want to see action words, and their interests. Ask the students what they love to do when they aren't at school, and then search for those keywords using the emoji search. This can be a powerful way to engage them into the program and become more active users, promoting discussion and understanding in searching a database (bonus!). Even creating 'exit ticket' questions:
The possibilities are endless...I'm excited to introduce this lesson in my classroom! :-) |
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Lindsey PietrocolaSince 2010, I've been incorporating technology (in some form or another) into a classroom as a teacher. Archives
April 2019
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