Attending a CUE conference is always worth the 9-hour drive from Elk Grove, CA to Palm Springs, CA. Last week’s #CUE19 three-day conference delivered on the promise to provide “dozens of workshops – hundreds of sessions – countless memories” – along with a number of digital citizenship/media literacy takeaways:

Got DigCit? 

As the co-directors of EGUSD’s Digital Citizenship Program, we really value opportunities to learn about ways other districts are weaving #DigCit into the school day, so we were excited to attend Ben Cogswell and Norma Gamez’s session.

If you check out their presentation, you will see that in addition to pulling lessons and resources from Common Sense and other organizations, they even create their own:

They also brought up a good point on the two ways we need to be rolling out digital citizenship – Explicit: Planned Lessons and Emergent: In the Moment:

planned lesson vs. in the moment

We’re looking forward to attending Ben and Norma’s session at Monterey Bay CUE’s May 18 DigCit Summit in Salinas, CA.

Session 5: Thinking Critically about the (Fake) News

It’s always a privilege to join Rob Appel and Kelly Mendoza for a #DigCit/#MediaLiteracy presentation. We were excited to present to a packed room full of educators enthusiastic about gathering new resources for this rapidly changing topic.

Thinking Critically Presentation

Over the past year, we have continued to update and add to our media literacy resources, with the goal of providing tips for helping students (and ourselves) step out of “filter bubbles,” use effective search skills, and become fact-checking pros (and lateral readers).

If you didn’t make it to our session, here’s the link to our session resources. We hope you can join us at the May 18 #DigCit Summit.

Can I Use That? Exploring Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons 

If you were one of our participants, thank you for your great questions and your interest in the topic. We wish this had been a 90-minute session. It’s always a challenge to pack all the information into an hour.

As essential as this topic is to media literacy/digital citizenship programs, we are finding that educators are still not feeling fully confident of their understanding of copyright, their ability to flex their fair use muscles, and their understanding of Creative Commons best practices. It was exciting at the end of our session to have a number of participants ask if they could use our presentation … the following Monday.

In addition to offering our sessions at national conferences, making sure Elk Grove Unified teachers and administrators have options within the district to attend our workshops is a top priority. We will be updating the ERO schedule soon with our next round of workshops and will also post the dates, times, and locations here on the website.

“I think the classroom teacher has a unique opportunity to introduce media literacy concepts and critical thinking questions every time they teach with images, film, video, news, advertising and the Internet.” Frank Baker, Media Literacy Clearinghouse