Recently my MYPC told me about a documentary on DW called "Will Germany's car industry survive?". I watched it over the weekend and thought it was perfect for our Grade 9 design unit on car design, but also that many of our other students would love it, especially as live in Stuttgart and many parents are working in the car industry! My MYPC and I discussed giving students more opportunities to watch documentaries in their advisory class.

In an advisory session coming soon(ish), the class will have the opportunity to pick a documentary to watch together. To help them come to a consensus, one of the ways they will have to justify the selection, is by saying why the documentary is useful for an IB Learner. Here they can use the IB Learner Profile, Mission or AtL skills to justify their selection. If they can't unanimously agree on one documentary, then the homeroom teacher will make the call.

The ATL focus is: Research Skills - Media Literacy: Make informed choices about personal viewing experiences

They can pick any documentary they want. It could be from a youtuber they love or something they have seen on TV.  Below are some options of places to look, along with some examples of documentaries. Our advisory sessions are an hour long, so it should give them time to find, discuss, pick, watch and reflect!
Documentary Sources
DW Documentaries
“DW Documentary gives you knowledge beyond the headlines. Watch high-class documentaries from German broadcasters and international production companies. Meet intriguing people, travel to distant lands, get a look behind the complexities of daily life and build a deeper understanding of current affairs a”

• People smuggling in Germany - a multibillion-dollar business (28 mins 27 secs)
• Refugees stranded in Greece (25 mins 55 secs)
• Rwanda - 25 years after the genocide (28 mins 25 secs)
• Slavery in Italy? (28 mins 26 secs)
• Will Germany's car industry survive? (28 mins 31 secs)
• Women's football in India (26 mins 01 secs)

Global Oneness Project
“We aim to connect, through stories, the local human experience to global meta-level issues, such as climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, poverty, endangered cultures, migration, and sustainability.”

• Alive & Kicking: The Soccer Grannies of South Africa (19 mins 38 secs)
• Living Service - The Slums of Ahmedabad (16 mins 43 secs)
• Not Just a Piece of Cloth - a volunteer-run urban recycling center in New Delhi (7 mins 05 secs)
• We Became Fragments -A story about a Syrian teenager Ibraheem Sarhan as he comes of age in Winnipeg, Canada. (12 mins 32 secs)
• While I Yet Live - Meet five African American women who are acclaimed quilters and freedom-fighters (15 mins)

Guardian Documentaries
Documentaries from the Guardian newspaper

• The Climate and the Cross (23 mins 01 secs)
• Little Pyongyang - A North Korean in South London (24 mins 02 secs)
• Silent Sam - The Mute Punk Singer (20 mins 56 secs)
• Trapped in the city of a thousand mountains - rap in China (20 mins 37 secs)

NY Times Op-Ed Videos
Short documentaries from the NY Times. All documentaries have an accompanying article linked below.

• Death Metal Grandma (12 mins 35 secs)
• Searching for Saraswati (19 mins 42 secs)
• Six Degrees of Immigration (12 mins 07 secs)
• Stonewall: The Making of a Monument (18 mins 36 secs)
• Tungrus and the Chicken From Hell (12 mins 36 secs)

Here's a link to the document. Feel free to make a copy for your students.

LASTLY - Please comment or tweet me links to other sources of good documentaries! I want to give my students a lot of choice, and also have documentaries being made/produced in different parts of the world. 

I recently become AtL coordinator at my school, and as I used to be a librarian, I thought this would be an excellent chance to put some Digital Citizenship lessons into the homeroom curriculum. Luckily my school, The International School of Stuttgart, (which is great!) have been supportive of me to doing this .For some, I took the amazing new lessons from Common Sense Media, and added some AtL reflections to them.Some of them I also shortened, or added in other videos/exercises to make them suit the needs of our school more.  For others I used various websites and videos. 

So that I don't overwhelm you all with lists of lessons, I thought I would share them each month.
For September we only have two based on Common Sense Media Resources:

• Grade 7 - The Power of Digital Footprints [ATL: Communication Skills: Participate in, and contribute to, digital social media networks]
• Grade 7 - The Four Factors of Fair Use [Research: Information Literacy Skills: Understand and implement intellectual property rights]
  
  

For Grade 9 I have a session about negative social media use and their digital footprints - from simple things like sharing too much information, through to sharing embarrasing information!

• Grade 9 - Social Media Mis-Use - [ATL: Self-Management: Organisational Skills: “Select and use technology effectively and productively”]

The Grade 9 presentation contains the following videos:

• Ellen showing embarrassing social media posts made by her live television audience!
• Are You Living an Insta Lie? Social Media Vs. Reality
• Quit Social Media

All great for starting interesting class discussions!

Grade 10 mostly have Personal Project sessions during advisory, but I have made sure to add some linked to digital citizenship. Students are very good at knowing how to cite work in their essays/reports, and are used to creating MLA8 citations in NoodleTools. However, they sometimes struggle when using video clips, photographs and music in works they create, like videos. This activity will focus on this skill....and is pretty rad, as it contains photographs of my dog Ru!

• Grade 10 Fair Use- [ATL: Research Skills - Understand and implement intellectual property rights]

Although I didn't use much of Common Sense Media's resources for this one, I did use their video "Copyright and Fair Use Animation".

The current Grade 8s had a slight problem with staying on task when using laptops last year...so I made sure their digital Citizenship activity focuses on this!

In this activity they look at:

• the Marshmallow Test and compare it to gaming in class.
• How much YouTube is used every second
• The video "I forgot my Phone"
• and...if they have time, they can watch the "‘Video Game Addiction’ Officially Recognized by the World Health Organization" video and use this for a debate!

Grade 8 - Staying on Task [ATL Self: Management: Affective Skills: Practise strategies to overcome distractions]

• Lastly...I put together a last-minute activity for our Grade 8 and 9 students today (our MYP certificate assembly was moved to a later date, so we had a free advisory period). This is focussing on misleading headlines. I used the TED ED Video "Can you spot the problem with these headlines?​" as a starting point

Grade 8/9 - Misleading Headlines [ATL: Research Skills: “Demonstrate awareness of media interpretations of events and ideas”].

I wanted it to be relevant, so I have them discussing the news events that happened this summer, then they can look at the front pages of today's newspapers on the Newseum website, and by using Newspaper Map. I really wanted to flag up these two websites to the homeroom teachers and students - they are fantastic for seeing current events and also seeing different perspectives!

Here's the final list of all our September Digital Citizenship Resources.

• Grade 7 - The Power of Digital Footprints [ATL: Communication Skills: Participate in, and contribute to, digital social media networks]
• Grade 7 - The Four Factors of Fair Use [Research: Information Literacy Skills: Understand and implement intellectual property rights]
• Grade 8 - Staying on Task [ATL Self: Management: Affective Skills: Practise strategies to overcome distractions]
• Grade 8/9 - Misleading Headlines [ATL: Research Skills: “Demonstrate awareness of media interpretations of events and ideas”]. ​
• Grade 9 - Social Media Mis-Use - [ATL: Self-Management: Organisational Skills: “Select and use technology effectively and productively”]
• Grade 10 Fair Use- [ATL: Research Skills - Understand and implement intellectual property rights]

(Grade 6 are starting the year with the water challenge activity - they will have digital citizenship lessons next month!)
Let me know if you have any questions and share back if you use them :)

Grade 6s start their AtL Skills Water Challenge this week. I delivered boxes of goodies, including the dirty water bottles, (collected from a local park, my garden and the school's car park!). I also delivered a class-set of my ATL posters, a Water Challenge poster and some ATL prompt sheets.
Feel free to use any of these :)

I am going to be starting off my Grade 8 students with a UN Global Goals prototype unit. The idea is that they choose a UN Global Goal they want to focus on, and they make a simple prototype, out of paper, card, tape, etc. They will then do a 'speed sharing' activity (similar to speed dating), where they can share their prototype with their peers.
Throughout the unit they will produce work for every strand in their process journal. After they have completed each criterion, they will select key pieces of information and will create a 'one pager' for their summative assessment. This will have key quotes, facts, words, as well as illustrations to add further meaning. I was inspired by the 'one-pager' episode on the Cult of Pedagogy podcast. Also design demands a lot of time, effort and work from our students, and I wanted to minimise that stress, by trying out a one pager as a solution.
Here is a link to the google slide - it has everything you need to run this unit yourself!

We have moved towards having an online portfolio, where students show their work for all subjects, as well as extra-curricular and advisory/core work. At the end of every unit I will have reflection tasks and will give students time to add to their portfolio. I'm asking them to put the four one-pagers (summative for each criterion), as well as their answers to our inquiry questions. In our final reflection I also ask students what we can do next with our ideas, which will hopefully lead to some action.

Let me know if you use this and what results you get. Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.
(Also this is based on the UN Global Goal Challenge activity I made - you can use this if you want to do a mini version of this product, or you want to use this in another subject or non-MYP classroom).

I wanted to share the website I put together for my students at the International School of Stuttgart. This is the third school where I have been the Personal Project Coordinator, (along with Halcyon London International School and the Atlanta International School), so this is a culmination of my learning over the last few years too. This is definitely the resource I am most happy with, as it contains absolutely everything a student, a supervisor or a parent could need. I've pulled information from the guide, the further guidance document, as well as presentations delivered to my students and teachers, worksheets/templates and examples.

Make sure you click on the 'More' button on the right hand side, as lots of tabs are hidden there.
Also if you go into any of the strands, under reports, you will find essay and process journal extracts!

Feel free to share with your colleagues or students, (but please make sure you mention that I made it).
If there's anything you think I am missing, please let me know :)

Click the button below to see our website:

(An avatar of me! The ClassCraft team made this after something I created was chosen as Quest of the Month. They also send me an amazing poster with this on too!)
​
Last year I used ClassCraft to gamify my classes. This is a great website, where all of my students can log in, and they can earn points, (through positive behaviour - linked to ATLs and IBLP, or through extra-credit quests), and they can customise their characters! It also has a lot of fun features, like the volume meter, (which my students literally beg me to put on), as well as boss battles, (multiple-choice battles, where they destroy a monster).

I very rarely set homework, and if I do, it is only a short reflection vide on FlipGrid. However, I have lots of students who ask to learn more. In ClassCraft I am able to make 'Quests'. This are story based, extra-cred activities, which students can do at their own pace, (you can also do it in class, and pace it yourself). I've done ones about how design improves space travel, right through to a coding quest.
Long quests are not part of the free package, but you can do quests, with up to six objectives, on the free account.

So that you can experience a quest, sign up to ClassCraft, and import this new quest I made. It is short, so available to all free accounts, and it focussed on the UN Global Goals. When you have an account, click this link to import the quest: "Save the World by 2030" I use the UN Global Goals for all my units, and have put this in ClassCraft, along with rewards for strengthening their Approaches to Learning Skills (ATLs) and demonstrating the IB Learner Profile!

If you like it, and sign up, then you are welcome to import my other quests too:

• Coding Quest
• EAL Designers (though many of my non-EAL students loved this too)
• An Extra Adventure (lots of design, from drone light shows, through to the LifeStraw)
• Someone's Been Painting the City (Street Art)
• Space Quest

Something I love about ClassCraft is how much people share. There's forums where you can ask for adice and a market place, where people share the quests and boss battles!

Lastly - I know that my post my sound a bit abstract, and you may just want to see it in action, so here is a video tutorial, showing all the key features and set up!