Students think SuperClubsPlus is “the coolest website”.

Super cyber safety with SuperClubsPLUS Australia & Telstra

Last term I introduced SuperClubsPlus to our grade 3 and 4 students so they have had their passwords for nearly a term. Even though they have only had one session in class time many of the students have made excellent progress in their own time. They have completed the Internet Safety Stars, created multiple web pages with music, pictures, games and surveys, web-rings and more.

SuperClubsPlus is an educational social networking site for primary aged students and a place where they learn about online safety and using online tools. NowWeAreTalking has more detailed information about the supporters in Australia if you are interested in introducing this in your own school.

Students become the teachers

When we have a class session of SuperClubsPlus the room is buzzing with students working together and helping each other work through the tasks to build their web pages and get their stars. The level of engagement is “super” high. Students start conversations in the yard at recess just to let me know how they are going or to ask a question about their web pages.

Great feedback on student progress

The statistics pages in the teacher section let me see at a glance the student’s progress and give a great overview of how often the students access the site and participate in the various activities.

Authentic Learning

I’ve been impressed about how effective the online safety message is when students actively participate in this community and get instant feedback from the mediators. Students often get carried away with giving out too many personal details but with SuperClubs they get instant reminders to change their behavior and it seems to work. It is like the game mentality where they have to obey the rules to proceed so they adopt the new behaviors and share the information with their friends to help them if they get stuck. I  am sure this behavior will spill over into their other online communities too.

We have really just scratched the surface with learning opportunities that we could create in SuperClubsPlus.

Wordle is…

Wordle lets you create artistic word clouds with your writing or just a bunch of words that you might choose to use  to describe something. It will give greater prominence to the more frequent words

and exclude the “stop words” (words too common to visualise). The colors and designs can be customised, its free and your Wordle is yours to do as you want with it! How good is that.

Some uses for Wordle

• If you put your student’s writing into Wordles over a period of time you could see if their vocabulary is developing and if they are using subject specific language so it is possible to use Wordle as an assessment tool.
• I’ve used it as a form of art work mixed with photos and for backgrounds on pages in the school magazine. It was a great way to highlight the key words for my subject in an interesting way that would catch the readers attention with a glance.
• Use it to summarise a piece of writing.

Suggestions from the SMARTboard lessons podcast

• It could be a springboard for predicting texts. Copy a couple of key paragraphs of a text that you are using with your students to create a Wordle and then let the students predict what the text might be about and they can become familiar with unfamiliar words before beginning their reading.
• Comparing texts a lesson for secondary schools.

If you have any suggestions please add them in the comments for others to share.