Happy Step Up Day! As you head into summer, please take a moment to review our MCDS Parent Tech Report, following our school-wide parent survey in April. The report includes data on how many MCDS students have smartphones; how many are using Snapchat and Instagram; how many are gaming; etc. Since each grade level comes [Continue]

As a preview of the forthcoming MCDS Parent Tech Survey results, we offer you the following guidance around Fortnite, the video game sweeping the nation since its release this past July: Data representing 43% of our MCDS Upper School student population indicates a >2:1 ratio of students not playing Fortnite, to those who are playing [Continue]

As 4th graders’ use of technology often expands to platforms like email, text, instant message, shared documents, and Google Classroom (where students can comment on class posts), students start to realize they have a digital voice all their own. They can suddenly use technology to communicate with others and express themselves. This is enormously compelling! [Continue]

The evening of Tuesday, January 23, Polly Ely gave an on-campus talk called “The House that Tech Built: Staying Attached with Tech All Around.” These are notes from that presentation, which focused on how to engage your child positively around her/his tech habits. You can read more about Polly Ely here: https://www.thelabmethod.com/about/ Self-determination theory (competence, [Continue]

We surveyed half our MCDS 7th graders (41 students) and half the 6th graders (42 students) during the fall of 2017. Here’s what we found out. December 2017 Upper School Student Tech Survey Results

For many years now, MCDS students have participated in Hour of Code, where students around the world practice coding during the first full week of December. This helps raise global awareness around the importance of learning to code in grade school. This week, all our 2nd-5th graders watched this 2-minute video: …and then chose coding [Continue]

This week in 3rd and 4th grades, we watched a series of short video clips to help guide and further our conversations around digital citizenship. As with past sessions, we found that using resources such as these, helped students build context around the idea of digital citizenship. Once the conversation was primed with a video [Continue]

For our third consecutive year, MCDS hosted a panel of sixteen 8th graders from participating Marin schools, who answered questions about their digital lives in front of a parent audience. Notes are below–some thoughtful, balanced answers that we hope are indicative of the work we’re doing with students around digital citizenship. Most notes are written [Continue]

As you may recall, 6th grade Tech/SEL content focuses on pros and cons of having/not having a mobile device. On September 27, we continued that conversation by polling two groups of MCDS 6th graders, each group containing 21 students. The results are presented in the PDF below. Headlines include: Overall, approximately 38% report already having their own smart phones [Continue]

The focus for the tech portion of 7th grade SEL shifts from cell phones to the broader, more abstract concept of the media. Like in our first 6th grade session, we started with the questions “What makes technology tricky?” and  “What makes it different from other things in our lives?” We also looked at some of [Continue]