How to address violence in the news with your students.
Teachers could get students to self-reflect, explore identity, and build digital literacy skills with BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF. Many learning management systems (LMS) and websites give students the options of adding an avatar; teachers might use BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF as a great, safe place to build colorful avatars for their LMS or other online tools. Building avatars is a perfect time to introduce digital citizenship skills such as how to safely represent yourself online. Teachers can also use this site to build digital literacy and computing skills. Young learners can improve their mouse and trackpad skills while learning how to navigate a child-centric web resource. The site can also be used to introduce printing, saving, and sharing images via email. Finally, students learning about animal adaptations could use the website to do some initial research on specific traits. Teachers could encourage students to explore the site first and then assign various types of adaptations to research. Students could be held accountable for the information in the "What's wild about you?" text box as a formative assessment.
Continue readingWith BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF, students can investigate each animal adaptation they choose; however, this feature is easily overlooked. This information is in a "What's wild about you?" text box displayed at the end of the experience, but the text may be difficult for some users to read, and there's no support for teachers to integrate the activity into a lesson. Weaving this information into creation rather than saving it until the end would be a more elegant approach. Adding audio narration options or short video clips and resource links would increase accessibility. There's also potential here to leverage the power of avatars to build important social and emotional learning (SEL) skills, specifically self-reflection. Students can imagine new identities for themselves, and explore what their avatars mean.