Digital Literacy that Pops

By Ms Lisa Plenty, Director of Digital Learning and Innovation

Recently Radford Junior School was invited by the team at the Apple Education Community to participate in a project to bring an arts activity into another area of the curriculum through a project called "Create Lessons that Pop". The release of this project aligned with the World Creativity and Innovation Day in April and was designed to inspire ideas for digital arts integration in a range of learning areas.

The Radford Digital Learning team proposed a learning activity with Year 2 classes and 2LM were the first class to try out this lesson. We used a lesson from the Cyber Safety Project, 'Now You Know Me', to formulate thinking and inspire ideas. We talked about our identity and privacy and led children to understand that their image is part of their identity and that it is important to consider when and with whom personal identifying information should (or should not) be shared.

This led us to an activity creating a digital artwork from a photo, where the deliberate intention was to obscure visual identity through the layering of digital drawing. Children also considered words that might prompt a pause to think about protecting their identity in an online world.

An Apple Education Community article related to our initial lesson with 2LM can be viewed at this link where the beautiful artwork of two of our well-obscured young students is celebrated (they know who they are and are very proud of their learning and achievement!). Thanks to Ms Leanne McKenzie and Mr Eric Jensen for co-teaching and sharing in the fun of this lesson.