Many good things happened over this year’s ISTE, one of which was we announced a partnership with Digital Citizenship Institute.
Digital Citizenship Institute works with communities around the world. It aims to change the narratives around the use of technology and social media, focusing on the positives, on the real world problems and get as many communities around the world involved. From a higher perspective, it’s all about humanizing the person next to you, around the world, and across the screen.
Dr. Curran from the institute said that 3DBear caught her attention when she came across an article that describes how the students in the city of Espoo redesigned the metro station with 3DBear to make it more accessible. The idea inspired her to come up with an inspiring project to run with the underprivileged girls in southern Utah. For Dr. Curran, digital citizenship means human connections, it would be meaningful for the girls to identify a problem in local or global digital community they are passionate about, connect with the global goals, then use 3DBear to visually capture what that might look like in action.
One of the first outcomes from this collaboration is curriculum around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Kids are naturally excited about these 17 goals, which include topics like “No Poverty” and “End Hunger”, and teachers love the projects because they hit learning standards in ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies and are easy to manage. During the course of the curriculum, students build scenes and videos in 3DBear around questions such as why is this a problem today, what would the world look like if this problem is solved, and what should we be doing now.
“Empowering and engaging every student” is the common denominator that brought 3DBear and Digital Citizenship Institute together, with this partnership, we are hoping to provide more opportunities for all kids to experience the art of being human.
Dr. Marialice Curran and Jussi Kajala, CEO of 3DBear presenting together on ISTE 2019
Contact us via email if you're interested in learning more about the UN project.
by Junyi Sun, pedagogy specialist at 3DBear
