EverFi Teacher Sign Up

I am blogging about my EverFi trial run with my students.  While our school is in the throes of Keystone Testing, I thought it best to take a side excursion with a lesson on Digital Citizenship; students are sometimes fried from 3-4 periods of standardized testing so why pile on.  There is also a lesson on STEM Education, but I am not attempting that with my students as of yet.

Starting out with EverFi is easy, the URL for the site is www.everfi.com/loginIf your school is not listed in the drop down menu while creating an account, it may take a bit of time to become verified.  You could also email my contact at EverFi Alyssa Mahramus, her email is amahramus [at] everfi.com, I checked with her about publishing her email before posting it here.  

Once you have your account started, the easy to use dashboard allows you to create classes, I made one class for each period, I will explain more in a bit.  You can also use the dashboard to review student scores, review ands reset student information, create student accounts, access your courses, and review support materials.   The entire menu is uncluttered with an easy dropdown interface.  You can also preview the lessons from the students’ perspective which I find very helpful.

I actually started by creating a class for my daughter, jumping right in without previewing the resources, it was easy to maneuver through the lessons.  I did preview the resources before rolling out the courses with my students at school, I wanted to be prepared for any questions they may ask.  

So, I clicked on the “Classes and Codes” tab and set up one class for each period of students, I like keeping the groups organized so I can filter information during class in an easy fashion.  I set up for the “Ignition” course; EverFi automatically creates a course code for the “Future Goals” STEM course if you go this route.  I did find that creating a course for “Future Goals” does not seem to reciprocate for “Ignition” in the same fashion.

Armed with class codes and pre-made curriculum I was ready to rollout the courses to my students.  The roll-out will be discussed in another post.

 

 

 

EverFi Experiment

Recently I encountered the opportunity to try out EverFi, a free website/program that offer courses in Digital Citizenship and STEAM Activities.  Digital Citizenship fits nicely into my curriculum, so I am giving it a try.

I started out the pilot project today with several of my classes; our school’s Winter Semi-Formal is tonight and many students had early releases to prep for the dance.  I thought it best to work with start with small groups and see how things work.

Overall it was a fairly painless experience, I will post a bit later on how to set up classes and how to sign up students for the lessons.

Digital Housekeeping

Yesterday, I was reflecting on some of my notes from PETE & C last week.  I am trying to round out my digital footprint from strictly “Techno Geek” stuff to adding more of the “Social, Non-Educational Me” stuff.  In the process of reflecting I noticed that my iPhone is running out of storage space.  Upon further review, I had over 380 new pictures that were not uploaded anywhere for safe keeping.

Since I was off from work, I decided to do some “Digital Housekeeping.”   I opened up several photo apps on my iPhone and began uploading the images to the appropriate websites.  I keep my family photos on one website, they are locked down as private; there is nothing inappropriate on the site, I am just more comfortable not sharing EVERYTHING with the world.

I also uploaded a bunch of images to my Flickr account.  This account has all of the images labeled with the Creative  Commons Reusable with Attribution license.  I place many generic, everyday photos of things I come in contact with here.  I make my students search for open source and resusable images when creating projects for class.  It is my belief that I should give back to the system and add images for others to use.

All images sent to Flickr also go to my family storage site, there is an overlap, but storage is free, so why not take advantage of the space.  Once I upload images, I am working on keeping only my favorites on my device.  This will free up Gigabytes of space on my phone and allow me to record many more family moments and general interesting events I see.  I need to do digital housekeeping on a regular basis and I still have a long way to go with pairing down the images on my devices.