Using tech to promote digital citizenship

The most quoted definition of a global citizen is a 1997 one promoted by Oxfam in the United Kingdom. It states a global citizen is someone who:

• is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen
• respects and values diversity
• has an understanding of how the world works
• is outraged by social injustice
• participates in the community at a range of levels, from the local to the global
• is willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place
• takes responsibility for their actions

In addition, Oxfam Education offers a great set of resource guides to infuse these aspects of becoming a global citizen across the curriculum.

• Education for global citizenship: A guide for schools
• Global citizenship in the classroom: A guide for teachers
• Teaching controversial issues
• Maths and global citizenship
• English and global citizenship
• Science and global citizenship

There are many similarities in the development of a global citizen and digital citizen. However, in order to become a global citizen, students need to have guided connections to students in other countries and cultures. Students will realize, through collaboration and communication with other students, that they have more in common than they have differences. This personal connection to others will help students become both knowledgeable and empathetic towards other cultures and countries.

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Global Projects

There are many global projects that can help students attain the qualities of a global citizen. Some of these are free and others are paid projects. Here are a few of the most popular.

One Day in the Life hosted by iEARN : This project pairs students across the globe who share photographs of daily life and special events, accompanied by written overviews. The students then discuss the similarities and differences in their countries and cultures.

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K-12 Global Art Exchange hosted by One World Classrooms : This long-running project has two levels of participation . The first is the physical sharing of creative art projects with other classrooms and the ability to follow up the sharing of the work with a VoiceThread conversation with them. The second digital option provides your students with a digital art exhibit with art created by students from over fifteen different countries or allows your class to connect with a single global classroom. When collaborating with another classroom, students conduct an online VoiceThread conversation with the partner classroom about their works of art.

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Rock Our World hosted by Rock Our World : On their site, the project is explained as “using Apple’s GarageBand, each country creates a 30 second drum beat.  Every Friday, that drum rotates to another country, where the bass guitar is added…At each stop, one more instrument is added.  When it comes back to the original country, it has touched students from all over the world! While the music is moving, students are meeting each other in live video chats to discuss various topics of curriculum.”

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Partner School Science Program (PSSP) hosted by Global Friendship Through Space Education : This project brings together classrooms from around the world with a focus on space education. Using NASA materials, students in partner schools study a curriculum unit together, and have an “ePal” to work with from the partner classroom. The goal is to both foster cross-cultural communication and collaboration and have students develop an interest in the STEM fields.

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Mystery Skype hosted by Microsoft : This project had the teacher connecting a classroom to another classroom or speaker via Skype. “The aim of the game is to build cultural awareness, critical thinking skills, and geography skills by guessing the location of the other classroom through a series of yes/no questions.” Microsoft provides a OneNote notebook with instructions and ideas for using this project in the classroom.

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Global Citizenship Activities and Resources

Educators freely share ways they are promoting cultural awareness in their classrooms. One great resource is the weekly Twitter chat #globaledchat, where you can discuss ideas, find international classroom partners for a specific project, or share something you are doing in your classroom.

Here are some ideas from other creative educators and organizations.

• Exploring cultures in your classroom: Fun activities to try (K-5)
• Three global collaboration projects for your classroom (K-12)
• Social justice projects in the classroom
• Five great multicultural activities to involve parents
• Ideas for global citizenship
• Qualities of the global citizen
• What does it mean to be a global citizen?

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Your thoughts

What resources do you use in the classroom to promote global citizenship? If you have participated in any global projects, please share your experiences on Twitter. And, if you have created your own project, feel free to invite others! #kathyschrock

Review of Vivi

As more schools move from interactive whiteboards to wall-mounted televisions or interactive panels, and from teaching in front of the roam to roaming the classroom, a simple screen mirroring and robust video streaming device is needed. This device needs to work with all platforms -- Windows, Mac, iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Linux DEB, and Linux RPM -- and be easy to use. It would be useful if it also included an administrative component to allow IT departments to manage the users and collect data on usage.

There is already a solution designed specifically for education called Vivi (http://www.vivi.io) that does all of this and more! I was sent one by the company to try out. 

I cannot speak to the administrative portal and central management components of the device at length since I do not have a school network to experiment with. However, I did have to use the admin panel to set myself up as a teacher user. You can find out more about the administrative portal here, view all the technical details here, and the company will gladly set up a demo to both showcase the Vivi's capabilities as well as answer any questions you might have!

PASSING CONTROL

The goal of the Vivi is to support real-time communication and collaboration in the classroom. The teacher is free to move about the classroom and mirror to the television or interactive panel. The teacher can give a student (or all students) control of the Vivi to share and showcase information with the entire class, too. 

Students can digitally "raise" their hand to ask for control from the Vivi app on their device as seen below. It does not matter what device they are using. This is a great feature for BYOD or 1:1 initiatives! The teacher is easily able to grant control by clicking on the student's name from the Vivi app on the their device.

Students can request control to screen mirror

Instead of worrying about a student in a nearby classroom requesting access to share their device's screen, you can put a 4-digit Room Code on your Vivi that your students need to type in to access the device. Also, once you have Room Code on your Vivi, you can give open access for your students to share their screens. Now, as with any code, you have to insist your students do not share the code with others. However, if you teach multiple classes, you probably will want to change the code regularly!

SHOWING VIDEOS

There are three ways teachers can show a video using Vivi. 

The first method allows you to copy an online video's URL from the Web and paste it into your Vivi app. The video will play through the Vivi and your teacher computer is free for other tasks, such as gathering additional information to share with students, monitoring a student chat about the video being shown, etc. View a training video about this feature here.

The second method is for you to play a video directly from your own device, rather than from the Internet. This is done by simply navigating to the video on your device through the Vivi app and clicking play! You will still have access to your computer screen for other tasks with this method.

The third method is called "Movie Mode" by Vivi. This option screenmirrors the video from your computer. When choosing Movie Movie mode as an option, there is a very short delay before the video begins to stream to allow for some buffering ahead of time so the video will play smoothly. To see more in-depth overviews of showing videos., check out this training video from Vivi.

Some of the options for showing videos through the Vivi

PAUSING A SCREEN

If you are mirroring your screen, and need to gather some additional resources for students, you can freeze a piece of content, like a Problem of the Day or a paragraph to read. While the content is "frozen", you are free to use your computer for gathering additional items of interest for students, opening a different app to showcase something else, etc. To learn more about the pause feature in Vivi, check out this video!

CAPTURING AND ANNOTATING

The capturing and annotation component of Vivi is very cool! First, you can mirror a piece of content from your computer screen via the Vivi app -- say projecting an unlabeled image of the parts of a flower or pausing a video you are currently showing. Students can then capture the image/video screenshot, use their Vivi app to pick the annotation tool, and annotate their own personal version of the image or video screen capture.

There are three choices to pick from when providing students with an image to annotate -- what is showing on their screen, an image from your device's photos, or a blank whiteboard students can create on.

Below is a sample of the student view of the annotation tools.

Student annotating an image captured with the Vivi annotation tool.

When students are done with their annotations, they can either download the annotated image to their device and submit it to you, or copy it and paste it into another document, like a shared Google Slide or another document of their own. To see this feature in action, view this training video!


MY EXPERIENCE

I wanted to put the Vivi through its paces, so I set up my Mac laptop as the "teacher device" and my iPad as the "student device". I attached the Vivi via HDMI to a television and via Ethernet to my Internet connection.

I printed out this useful PDF with a labeled overview of the features of the teacher dashboard in the Vivi app that provides a simple explanation of each of the teacher tools.

I logged in as a student in the app with no problem, but needed a presenter code (which would be supplied by your IT department) to log in as a teacher on my laptop, so I knew I had to open the admin portal.

The company had set me up as an admin, so I opened the admin portal from my computer and had to put in a change of PW to create my own so I could log-in. The default options in the portal were already turned on, such as allowing me to direct-play videos, share links in the app, etc.

I then plugged in the Vivi and it took a minute to show up on the television screen because it was setting up, but was ready to go in no time. I went back to the admin portal and noticed the Vivi I had plugged in was now showing up as a room, and, as an admin, I could change the splash image, manage the locations of the boxes, push out an emergency broadcast, and a ton more customization  options. Everything seemed quite straightforward and the user guides included were very detailed if I needed help, but I really did not!

On my "teacher device", I tried out all the features of screen mirroring, the different options to play videos, to supply the students with a static image to annotate, and pausing the mirroring. I found a feature I had missed, which was the ability to share a URL with all the students. The shared URL showed up in their Vivi app, and they just clicked on it!

I then turned to my "student device" and requested control access, and went through all those options available to students. One thing I learned -- if your students are using iPads -- is to have students turn on AirPlay and pick the classroom Vivi to mirror to. Another option I appreciated finding was, when a student has control and is sharing a video through their Vivi app, you can pause their video from YOUR teacher Vivi app if necessary. Just in case you want to discuss something...or something not quite right is on the screen!

The set-up and administration of the Vivi was straightforward, and the classroom use by teachers and students was simple. The mirroring from the devices was instantaneous, the streaming did not hiccup at all, and the pass-off of control from teacher to student was very easy!

If you are moving to televisions or wall-mounted displays in your classroom, take a look at the Vivi to allow freedom for you from the front of the room and the ability of students to share with others from anywhere in the room. Vivi is a winner!

Thinking processes and STEM

STEM, with its combined focus on science, technology, engineering and math, should also include the important skill of learning how to think. There are many models of thinking processes available to teach to students, each with a different focus or goal. I am going to showcase some of the most popular and let you, as the creative educator, pick the one that best meets the needs of your students. You might even decide to take the most relevant parts of each and develop your own model!

After you read about each model, ask yourself the following questions.

• How would I introduce this model into the classroom?
• What content in the STEM curriculum would benefit most from this model?
• What can I easily adapt to infuse this model?
• What would implementation of this model look like in the classroom?
• What would be my goal(s) for students when using this model?
• Where can I find additional resources on this model?

Model 1: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, a revision of a cognitive thinking classification, was published in 2001 by Anderson and Krathwohl. Their goal was to move the elements of the classification from static to action verbs and combine the classification with four types of knowledge acquisition for students. From these two components, the cognitive process dimension and the knowledge dimension, teachers could create learning objectives and help students move through the levels of the basic taxonomy – Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating – and move them from the use of lower order thinking skills to the higher order thinking skills.

Anderson and Krathwohl defined the Knowledge Dimension as a place for student to move from concrete through abstract knowledge, and through the four categories of factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge.

We are all familiar with the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy classification of the cognitive processes.

However, the most useful part of helping students move through these levels, as they learn something new, are the more specific verbs that fall under the six broader categories in the pyramid image.

In 2008, Andrew Churches mapped the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to the use of technology to help students move from the lower to higher order thinking skills and published Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.

Additional resources for Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

• Link to a useful handout that outlines more about this thinking skills process
• Keywords and questions at each level of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.
• Apps and tools to support Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy

Model 2: Computational thinking

Computational thinking (CT), as defined in Google’s “Computational Thinking for Educators” course as a…

…problem solving process that includes a number of characteristics and dispositions. CT is essential to the development of computer applications, but it can also be used to support problem solving across all disciplines, including the humanities, math, and science. Students who learn CT across the curriculum can begin to see a relationship between academic subjects, as well as between life inside and outside of the classroom.

https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=u_JWGzIAdNo

Traditionally, the broad overview of Computational Thinking was “an approach to solving problems in a way that can be solved by a computer”. The model has students thinking like a computer scientist in areas across the curriculum. Computational thinking is not programming or coding. It is the formal planning process that occurs before the programming or coding occur. As Higson outlines in this video , computational thinking is the process by which students use their knowledge of what computers can do to help them solve problems.

There are four traditional components in the process of computational thinking, as outlined on the BBC Bitesize site –

• decomposition – breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts
• pattern recognition – looking for similarities among and within problems 
• abstraction – focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail
• algorithms – developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem

The computational thinking process is different than the Bloom’s Revised taxonomy thinking process because it is not hierarchical. Each of the four components are equally as important in the thinking process of solving the problem.

Additional resources for Computational Thinking

• Bringing computational thinking to K-12
• Jeannette M. Wing: Computational thinking
• Lesson plans across the curriculum using CT
• Computational thinking across the curriculum
• Resources and support material for computational thinking

Model 3: Design Thinking

My favorite definition of design thinking is from Kricia Cabral on the Scholastic site, who states “design thinking is a creative problem-solving process that calls for thoughtful solutions to real-world situations”. Design thinking is a thinking process that can work nicely for the STEM curriculum topics as well as across other content areas.

There are many, many design thinking models, all of which promote a similar thinking process. Following are images and links to some popular models. Libby Hoffman included some of the ones below in a blog post and I have added additional models that I think are well-stated and useful.

• The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford)
• The IDEO Model
• Google Design Sprints
• The Tallyfy Model of Design Thinking

The Launch Cycle for K-12

My favorite model for K-12!

• Resources and materials to support the design thinking model

Do you have a specific thinking model you use with your students? Have you developed your own? Please share your thoughts, links, and resources on Twitter! #kathyschrock

Fake news: Fact or opinion?

Becoming a good digital citizen commonly includes the mastering of a multitude of skills. 

The Digital Classroom Starter Kit from Common Sense Education provides digital citizenship activities and lessons as part of their classroom technology use ideas. They also provide a wonderful K-12 digital citizenship curriculum with the scope and sequence found here and have recently started updating their curriculum. You can visit their News and Media Literacy units here.

There are also many other sites which outline the nine elements of digital citizenship in detail as you can see from this Google search. Although these elements are all important, the element of digital citizenship I am most passionate about is the information literacy element. This great poster, in a post on ISTE’s site, describes it best:

"A good digital citizen applies critical thinking to all online sources and doesn’t share non-credible resources, including fake news or advertisements."

But how can a student, searching the Web to learn something new, know if they have landed on a non-credible site? Without a knowledge-base in the topic, it may be hard for them to determine incorrect information. I have been working with critical evaluation of Web material since the inception of the graphical Web. As I created my Guide to Educators back in 1995, I realized early-on that determining credible information was difficult. I have critical evaluation worksheets on everything from Web pages to podcasts located here to help students think carefully about a site they are viewing or a podcast they are listening to.


However, non-credible information used to be more about accidental mis-information by someone who did not know enough about a topic or the unsure decision about the credibility of the author, not the intentional trickery, as it is seems to be today. We must work with students so they can both recognize biased information and know the difference between a fact and an opinion. These skills are life skills, not just Internet information skills!

Recognizing bias

Kimberly Moran, in her blog post on WeAreTeachers, provides seven tips for teaching students to recognize bias. Moran includes some great ideas and lessons, too. Here are a few of her suggestions.

• Help students understand what the terms “fake news” and “news bias” really mean.
• Provide an explanatory overview of each.
• Give your students information that seems real and have them evaluate it. Here is a list of some sites I have identified as useful for student critical evaluation practice.

• All About Explorers: Christopher Columbus
• Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies
• Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide
• Burmese Mountain Dog
• Burmese Mountain Dog 2
• Buy an Ancestor Online
• California’s Velcro Crop Under Challenge
• Case Analysis of a Historic Killer Tornado
• Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division
• Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
• Google Job Opportunities
• Google Technology
• Jacopo di Poggibonsi
• Mankato (MN) Home Page
• MoonBeam Enterprises and Lunar Travel Agency
• History of the Fisher-Price Airplane
• OvaPrima Foundation
• Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
• Target Field Collapses
• Taxonomy of Barney
• Visit Exciting Fredericton

Moran also suggests teaching your students how to cross-check information. Have them look for conflicting information about the author of the text, images that have been edited, exaggerated claims, and use the “Links to this URL” on Google’s Advanced Search page to see if credible sites link to the one they are researching.

Here are some additional sites and resources to help teach about bias.

• The Institute for Humane Education provides a list of sites to help educators recognize their own unconscious bias and how to teach students to recognize implicit bias.
• Teaching Tolerance offers a lesson plan for students in grades 6-8 that “focuses on teaching students to identify how writers can reveal their biases through their word choice and tone”.
• The MediaSmarts site provides high school students with the skills to recognize bias and point of view in newscasts and newspaper articles based on the language used in the story and also understand the role of subjectivity and perception in the media. This lesson plan includes having students deconstruct a news story based on language, story selection, and story order.
• This character education lesson, Recognizing Bias, provided by Learning to Give, helps middle schools students, through a simple classroom activity, to understand about personal biases.
• Discovery Education includes a 2:37 Common Craft video called Bias Detection. This short video demonstrates the importance of recognizing and accounting for bias when evaluating sources of information. It is intended for students in grades 6-12.
• Humans as Variables (4:47) is another Discovery Education video clip and it is intended for grades K-5. Its purpose is to show students how a person’s bias could have an impact on a scientific study’s results.
• The Facing History and Ourselves site includes an eleven lesson unit, Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age. This unit is to help students understand and recognize the choices facing journalists, explore the impact of social media on current-day news cycles, and become critical consumers of news. The essential question for the unit is:

"What is the role of journalism in a democratic society, and how can we become responsible consumers and producers of news and information in the digital age?"

Fact or opinion?

An information literacy topic, related to recognizing bias, is that of determining if something is a fact or an opinion. Oftentimes, students mistake well-stated opinions for fact. There are some great sites on the Web with information and tips to give students practice with the skills to know the difference..

• Media specialists Donna Mignardi and Jennifer Sturge curated a list of resources to help middle school students recognize the difference between fact, opinion, and informed opinions. The sites they include focus on fact-checking lessons and resources.
• A lesson plan by Scott Ertl is a guidance lesson for students in grades K-5. The lesson includes the comparison of fact and opinion materials in the news media. It also contains a guidance component titled “My Opinion Matters”. In this section, students practice positive responses to not-so-nice opinion statements classmates might make.
• This lesson, posted on MediaSmarts, for grades 9-12, Fact Versus Opinion, was adapted from a publication by the Canadian Newspaper Association titled “News is not just black and white”. The lesson includes activities for recognizing bias and understanding how newspapers often include both fact and opinion in the same news story.
• The New York Times Learning Network provides practice in determining fact and opinion in this lesson. Of course, the Learning Network has plenty of material to pick from, and provides links to real articles that students can discuss. The activities include use of pencil and paper, but students could just as easily mark them up on a digital device.
• This mini-lesson from the Public Schools of Robeson County (NC) is an excellent resource for teaching the younger (grade 3-5) students about fact and opinion. The lesson includes explicit instruction and pedagogical tips for the educators, too! I believe that this min-lesson would also work for middle school students. Some of the components of the lesson can easily be completed using online tools, too.
• Discovery Education includes materials for support of teaching and learning about fact vs. opinion for students in grades 6-8. The 4:21 video segment, Fact vs. Opinion, provides scenarios to help students recognize both fact and opinion in informational text.
• The Author’s Purpose, another video clip in the Discovery Education collection, is a 4:24 video for grades 3-5. It helps students evaluate writings and decide if an author is trying to inform (fact) or trying to persuade (opinion).

How do you teach about fake news? Share your tips on Twitter. #kathyschrock

Using listening to develop H.O.T.S.

Developing the  higher order critical thinking skills, as outlined by Rasmussen College, includes multiple areas to concentrate on. The author, Will Erstad, states “critical thinking is the analysis of an issue or situation …the facts, data or evidence related to it (and) is a skill that allows you to make logical and informed decisions to the best of your ability.”

The six categories included for developing and improving the higher order critical thinking skills included in the article are:

1. Identifying the situation and the factors that may influence it.
2. Locating the basis for the research that is presented to understand the big picture.
3. Learning how to avoid personal biases and to “evaluate information objectively”.
4. After gathering information, using the knowledge to make logical inferences.
5. Figuring out what information is most important and relevant to the situation.
6. Developing the practice of curiosity– asking open-ended questions and following up on the answers.

One important skill for students to develop, that will help them attain the higher order thinkings skills, is the ability to listen. Including listening skills practice whenever possible can result in students becoming better communicators and questioners.

Listening skills practice ideas 

A framework for planning a listening skills lesson

In this framework, Nik Peachey provides an overview of the pre-listening exercises needed, how to develop listening skills tasks which allow repeated listening trials, and includes suggestions of post-listening activities that concentrate on the meaning of the text or those that target the linguistic features of the text. The overview of the lesson itself has students brainstorming, listening, and reflecting on the content of a song.

Listening activities to get your students back into an attentive habit

Elyse Rycroft, a primary teacher from Vancouver, British Columbia, includes six strategies in her blog post to help teach listening skills in the classroom.

1. Model good listening strategies to the class by having a student come up and interact with you. Things like eye contact and not interrupting are some of the skills students need to promote active listening.
2. Using the “Think, Pair, Share” strategy for students to practice listening skills works well.
3. Explaining and practicing the “whole body listening” model can help students acquire the attentiveness habit.
4. Have students play “Telephone” or complete the next word in a story being being created aloud.
5. Students get into groups of three and develop a story aloud, but this time, each student adds an entire sentence to the story. You can have students audio or video record this activity with an iPad for your review later.
6. And, of course, the old favorite, “Twenty Questions” can be used for both listening skills practice and content review.

Five classroom activities to improve listening skills

Janelle Cox includes creative activities in this post. Two of these are:

• Having pairs of students come up with a “secret phrase” that other students need to listen for in regular conversation as the school day goes on.
• Have two students sit back to back. One student has a photograph that they describe in detail, and the other student draws what they hear either on paper or on a tablet.

Ten teaching strategies to help students listen

Janelle Cox also penned this great overview of how we, as teachers, can support students as they enhance their listening skills.

1. Model good listening skills by repeating what the student has said.
2. Get to know your students personally.
3. Have students use “thumbs up/thumbs down” for a quick formative assessment of whether they understood what they have heard.
4. Talk less and chunk-up longer lessons into mini-lessons.
5. Use online videos from subscription services like Discovery Education and/or YouTube or Vimeo to provide students with other “experts” to listen to.
6. Provide students with a learning task during a break, such as a discussion with another student about what they heard you say.
7. Give students time to check-in with a peer about something they do not understand or might have missed.
8. Hold students accountable by providing them with a high-level overview of what is to be covered, but making sure they have to listen to learn more about the topic or concept.
9. Have students listen for a purpose. For example, pause teaching and have them write a summary or a question about what they heard.
10. Mix up your teaching strategies to keep students on their toes and listening!

Improve your communication skills with three active listening tips

This article, intended for working adults, provides a great overview of effective ways to become an active listener. As quoted in the article:

…the average person listens with only 25% efficiency. Research offers a number of interesting explanations for this, including our fondness for talking about ourselves, our tendency to interrupt and swap stories, and our inclination to go into “helper mode,” where we try to fix the speaker’s problems.

I felt as if the author of the article had met me and had a conversation with me! I love to talk about myself, interrupt others all of the time, and always feel I have the solution for everything. (Not traits I am proud of.) I am going to practice the suggestions in this article–

• Concentrate on the speaker and pay close attention; stay in the moment
• Provide “playbacks’ or short comments starting with “It sounds like you are saying” or “In other words” to prove to myself that I am really listening
• Practice and practice “playbacks” in all communications I have on the phone, with my friends, at the grocery store, etc. in order to be comfortable with the process

Your thoughts and ideas

What methods have you used to help students become better listeners? Can you recommend some strategies that work better than others? Have you collected resources on this topic? Please share on Twitter! #kathyschrock

College and career readiness activities

Helping students think about their future is one of the goals of college and career readiness. Students need time to research occupations, decide what career path they want to take, which things they are good at, and, most importantly, what they are passionate about. There are tons of sites on the Web to help students with this process.

One publication I love to recommend to support this process is the Occupational Outlook Handbook. It is updated every two years by the United States Department of Labor, but data not including projection data is updated more frequently. This publication includes information on:

• What workers do on the job
• Work environment
• Education, training, and other qualifications needed to enter the occupation
• Pay
• Projected employment change and job prospects
• State and area data
• Similar occupations
• Contacts for more information

The Occupational Outlook Handbook’s Teachers Guide page goes into much more detail on the make-up of the information on each page.

MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

The Occupational Outlook Handbook can be the basis for many different college and career readiness activities.  Here are some I feel would be engaging and useful for students. In addition to just researching the careers, students are also using their communication, creativity, and critical thinking skills as they work through the activities.

• To make sure students become familiar with a wide range of career options, one activity could have the teacher creating a “random career generator”. (This can be done digitally or simply on slips of paper that get pulled from a box.) Students then read the Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for the career they receive, and present the career to the rest of class by creating a short video overview using iMovie, WeVideo, Clips, or Adobe Spark Video. The Occupational Outlook Handbook includes questions students might use for both this activity and for researching other careers they are interested in.
  • How does the occupation fit your skills and interests?
  • What will you be doing in the occupation?
  • What is the necessary education and/or training?
  • How many jobs are there in the occupation currently?
  • Is the occupation projected to grow, decline, or remain unchanged? Why?
  • How much does this occupation pay? What do the top 10 percent earn? The bottom 10 percent?
  • Find someone with a job in the occupation you are interested in, and interview him or her.
    • What kind of work does the person do?
    • What does the person like and dislike about the job?
    • What advice would the person give to someone interested in a career in this field?

• A Skype in the Classroom activity might include students searching and reading about careers which they are  interested in the Occupational Outlook Handbook.  The students would then create a persuasive essay or video as to why the class should agree to find an expert to Skype with in this chosen career. Having passionate students address their dreams and goals to convince others through voting or consensus would lead to some lively discussion in the classroom!

• Once students have identified at least one career from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, have them create a Fakebook profile, screenshot the final project, and post the JPEG/PNG to a shared Padlet. Have other students post questions to the posted profile on the Padlet page, and have the student answer while staying in their chosen career  role.

• Students can also design a LinkedIn-replica page using Weebly or Keynote, PowerPoint, or Slides, and include the “current” job of their persona as well as the “past” jobs leading up to the current one. This exercise will help students understand both the educational and training aspects of the career.

• Once students have researched their career, have them create a cover letter and resume for applying for an entry job in their chosen field. Minnesota State’s CAREERwise Education page includes well-done overviews of both cover letters and resumes.

• Students can use the information found in one or more careers to practice their data literacy skillset, too. Students can use the data component of the occupation or occupations to manipulate the data for their own graphs and charts. 

Under the “State and Area Data tab, students will find the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) for the career of a middle school teacher. This page includes tables of data and state-by-state information. Students could easily use the data for creating an infographic about their chosen career/careers. In addition, besides the informational infographic they can create, they can also make an advocacy infographic for promoting this career. (For more on types of infographics and how-to ideas, please see Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything: Infographics as a Creative Assessment.)

ELEMENTARY ACTIVITIES

The Occupational Outlook Handbook is most likely written at a too high a reading and interest level for most elementary students. Here are a few resources for this age group.

• The Texas Labor, Market and Career Information group, part of the Texas Workforce Commission, has a wonderful activity book for elementary students titled “Careers are everywhere!“. The activities in this book were mapped to the National Career Development  Guidelines (NCDG) to help students achieve these goals.
  • Self-Knowledge
    • 1. Knowledge of the importance of self concept
    • 2. Skills to interact with others
    • 3. Awareness of the importance of growth and change
  • Educational and Occupational Exploration
    • 4. Awareness of the benefits of educational achievement
    • 5. Awareness of the relationship between work and learning
    • 6. Skills to understand and use career information
    • 7. Awareness of the importance of personal responsibility and good work habits
    • 8. Awareness of how work relates to the needs and functions of society
  • Career Planning
    • 9. Understand how to make decisions
    • 10. Awareness of the interrelationship of life roles
    • 11. Awareness of different occupations and changing male/female roles
    • 12. Awareness of the career planning process

The activities in the PDF include interest inventories, reflecting on jobs of the future, resume-writing, math skills, and investigations into many categories of careers.

• ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning and ACE’s American College Application Campaign have created a document with college and career awareness activities for PreK through middle school students. Each of the awareness activities include both a lower level and higher level activity. For instance, there is a Career Bingo activity for elementary students and a Human Bingo activity for the older students. The older students need to locate teachers and administrators in their school who had certain educational experiences, such as “had a job when in college” or “studied on a Saturday night while they were in college”. The activities seem like they would be engaging for students.

What resources do you use to support college and career awareness and readiness? Have you used the Occupational Outlook Handbook in the classroom? Let me know what you did with it, and, if you try any of the activities in the article, please let me know how it went! Please leave a post on Twitter! #kathyschrock