Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ideas about digital citizenship

Cyber/Digital Citizenship Issues You Encountered and What you Did

- students, staff, parents (we’re in the ed business), staff don’t understand, they don’t understand the risks… “they see my Facebook page”… staff needs PD about this

- teacher who used to model, that students found… she contacted website, they removed the picture, but she is concerned it is still out there (digital footprint)

- elementary school, recently have wireless, parents are concerned about access; I make the argument that kids have made notorious mistakes in junior, high school, so if we start in kindergarten, they will make mistakes here, not later… they will understand the gist of it. So, start digital citizenship, footprint issues earlier. The more we can do at an earlier age, the better.

- Girls on a chat site, cyber nastiness; girl hit “print screen” to show how she had been bullied; girls who did the bullying had to read it face to face.

- We updated Responsible Use (from Acceptable Use); instead of list of don’ts, we state it positively. General types of things, with the idea that teachers will explain, facilitate, enforce. Not one shot, revisited throughout the year.

- Sexting issue; a student who was sending out photos on demand. Assoc. says can’t look at cell phones. Cyberbullying; anonymous sites are vicious.

- Students were hazing, photos on Facebook, enflamed the community, shocked parents. We adopted strict anti-hazing policy.

- Skill level of children vs. understanding what they are really doing. We had girls who created a Wiki, unmentionable.com, using a teacher’s sign on! Really educating. Lead to discussions about the utility of different tools. We resolved this by talking about it. Girls were creeped out by it. Removed quickly. Lead to good conversations.

- Double-edged sword; leave a trail, we can see what they are doing sometimes.

- Cyberbullying; children doing things before understanding the ethics of what they are doing.

- Parents don’t understand the technology themselves; parents show up with printscreens about people bullying their kids; but parents do it too. Everyone needs to be better educated.

- School board level put together a digital citizenship unit; everyone teaches units. Digitalcitizenrdcrd.wikispaces.com

- DesireToLearn has a lot of resources; we can monitor what kids do; what’s alarming is that where they bully shifts to Facebook and other venues. It is about character education in a digital world.

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