The EdInnovation Summit 2016 starts tomorrow and I’m looking forward to sharing two talks with local teachers, students, school administrators, technology integration specialists, College and University Faculty.

Fear No More: Developing Digital Literacies for Courageous Digital Citizenship.

In this talk, I invite teachers to think critically about how we define digital literacies in schools and how we truly scaffold participatory social-action oriented digital citizenship for our students. I provide recommendations, based on recent scholarship, for activities that will support development of foundational digital citizenship skills that move beyond simply knowing not to cyberbully or download inappropriate content. Teachers are invited to contribute ideas to a crowd sourced Acceptable Use Policy that, I hope, will generate meaningful discussion about the way that these AUP documents are (and are not) used as teaching tools.

Slides: EdInnovation2016_CourageousDigitalCitizenship

The Maker Mindset.
In this talk, I share a personal story about why maker education is important to me — and for many students in our schools. I share a definition of the Maker Mindset and use recent scholarship on Maker Empowerment and Creativity in Teaching to show that excellent teachers demonstrate many of the thinking skills and ways of being in the world that are part of the maker mindset — embracing intellectual risk-taking, designing authentic real-work activities driven by student interests and seeing interdisciplinary connections (Henriksen & Mishra, 2015). I also share examples of what it looks like as teachers develop a maker mindset and a feeling of maker engagement and examples of activities that teachers can implement that invite students, especially those who are not traditionally