Context and Introduction to the Project
The lessons collected in this project are inspired or remixed extensions and revisions of the work done by the creators of the Our_Space: Being a Responsible Citizen in a Digital World casebook. The focus of the lessons within that text focused on students in grades 7-12, with examples and content primarily appropriate for a Secondary school audience.
We cannot pretend that we can improve on that work, and certainly feel that the lessons available through that project, when implemented within a classroom, will have a positive impact on how students interact and engage in the present age. Our attempt here — as the creators have graciously allowed through their Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License — is to create lessons that are responsive to a need we were seeing to start having this conversation at a younger age. Our hope is that these lessons, geared towards a Grade 4-6 audience, will enable more teachers to benefit from the themes and conversations presented in the Our Space document.
In some instances we were able to make smaller changes to the lessons to help make them more accessible to a younger audience, and in other circumstances — always adhering to the five themes established by the Our Space writers (Participation, Identity, Privacy, Credibility, Authorship and Ownership) — we created our own lessons to help attend to the needs of a younger age group. There are also instances where we have contextualized the lessons further to leverage the use of board and provincially-provisioned tools: you are more than welcome to utilize these lessons in much the same way that the Our Space writers have shared their work, remixing and contextualizing them for a different audience.
Please feel free to comment on the project as a whole in the space provided within the Discussion tab on this page, or on individual lessons within the wiki. Our hope is that these lessons continue to grow and develop as they are utilized with classrooms. Your comments will help guide changes and additions to the tools. Please share your successes, your frustrations, or the ways in which you remixed the lesson to contextualize it for the varied needs of your learners.
We must acknowledge the writing team on this project, who wrote these modules through Google Docs, providing feedback and support for one another throughout the process, and modelled how collaboration looks in the 21st Century. Although there were individual lesson assignments, the finished product would look very different if it wasn’t for the supportive space and connections provided through the process. Thank you for all of your help.
Download the Casebook