Week 2

I teach seventh grade Social Studies in Ohio. The large majority of the standards that I teach have to do with world history. The NETS standards and indictors help teachers teach twenty-first century skills to their students. They show teachers the expectations of the twenty-first century.
One of the indicators that I am planning on working on is in the first standard "Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity. The indicator is "engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources." The way I am going to teach this to my students is by having one activity per quarter that has to do with a real world problem. One example of a project we will be doing this year is when we go over the crusades. After we discuss the Crusades in my classroom, we will talk about the problems that are currently going on the Middle East (Israel). Then have the students use a program like Google maps and/or other visualization tools to let the students attempt to make new laws/boarders for the Middle East. At the end of each project, I will have the student evaluate me and the project to see what I can do to make the projects better.
The other standard that I am planning to work on is standard four "Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility" indicator one "advocate, model, and teach, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources." The way I am going to do this in my classroom is at the beginning of the year, I am going to have a short unit with our Language Arts teacher about plagiarism and the use of reputable resources online. This lesson we have come up with is used to show the students a handful of websites that have factual information and fake websites. We will go through these websites with the students and point out how to decide if the website is reliable or not. The students will then spend a day in the lab doing a webquest, looking at different websites and deciding on their own if the website is reliable or not. A webquest is a website that walks students through an activity in an organized format (Cennamo, Ross Ertmer 2009). The webquest will walk the students through a handful of questions, such as: "Who is responsible for the information of the resource, when was the information published and why is the resource published?"We will also be spending about a week in the library with the librarian showing the students how to cite different material they find in books and websites. The way that I will be evaluating myself to see if I hit this standard/indicator well is by checking throughout the year to see if students are citing their projects correctly and using websites that are reputable.
References
Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.