Digital Citizenship in Junior High
On Friday, January 29th, the grade 7 & 8’s spent an afternoon participating in a session on Digital Citizenship.The focus of the event was to raise awareness about how we interact with others through social media, and to learn effective ways to communicate. Aidan and Micah, two grade 7 students, shared their reflections on the day.
“Classes were held for most of the morning, but the fun began at 11:00, when we enjoyed pizza, cookies, vegetables (not a best seller) followed by a presentation about Digital Citizenship in the library led by Ms. Wiebe.
We began the session by watching a short video called “Bully Dance”, we had a discussion about bullying and what we thought bullying is. We were then paired up and told to log into an interactive website called Nearpod. Questions popped up on the screen about bullying, and we responded with our partner by typing answers. We were able to see everyone’s responses on our own screen. We went over the terms “bully”, “bystander”, and “victim”. After that we did a few multiple choice questions to test our knowledge about what we had learned.
And finally, we read a story about a boy named Kevin. He had posted a video for his best friend to see; his best friend then sent it out to all his friends, who sent it out to others, and soon it got millions of views, and hateful comments like: “fat nerd” and “idiot”. We were asked to make either a storyboard on the ipads or a short skit, and give the story an alternate ending. The point was to recognize that we have opportunities to change the outcome of these kinds of experiences. About half of us worked with the storyboard and half chose to do skits.
Ms. Wiebe was able to display all the storyboards on our ipads so we could all watch and listen to the story endings. The skits were fun – we participated with another group to create an alternate ending – and it was the highlight of the afternoon!
The Student Leadership Team had prepared a snack for us, and after that we all went to the gym for games of bubble soccer (or bubble tackle), board games, ping pong and foosball for the last part of the day. It was a great way to end the day!”
Aidan Morton Ninomiya and Micah Neufeld, grade 7
