Tool #11: Digital Citizenship

The three objectives I plan on teaching my students this upcoming school year when it comes to technology are
1. Digital Security and Safety: Receiving the new netbooks and Ipod Touches is wonderful! We can do so many wonderful things with them to enhance our students learning. But with this new hardware comes a huge responsibility. We, as teachers must provide our students with a good understanding of digital security and safety. Although we would like to constantly be monitoring them on these new devices, it is impossible for a teacher to have eyes on every single student in the class and what they are working on/looking at on the internet. In order for us to fully take advantage of this new technology we have received, we must educate our students on the good AND the bad of what is out there. Mrs. McClendon showed our students a video on Brainpop at the beginning of the school year teaching students about safety on the internet, so that would be something we could look at watching with our students. At meet the teacher at the beginning of the school year, I plan on talking to parents about the new technology that we have in the classroom and the importance of making sure we (parents and teachers) know what our student is doing on the computer. Making parents aware of this is also very crucial, they can talk to their child at home about this also. It is imperative for us to talk to our kids about the different websites out there and discuss the pro's and cons of these sites, discuss if these sites are appropriate for use in school and to what extent (e.g. Facebook and MySpace). It is important to share with students all of the wonderful things the internet has to offer, but that there are things out there that are not so wonderful.

2. Digital Etiquette (netiquette): The key-be a role model to the students! If you, the teacher is setting a good example for students, they are more inclined to follow your lead. They must look to someone so we should set that good example for them to look to. It is important for us to talk to our students and stress that they should not say stuff over the internet that can be taken the wrong way or can hurt someones feelings since it is very difficult to hear your tone, people may not know if you are joking or are serious. I plan on talking to my students about how they can have good "netiquette" and that they have to be careful because some people spend so much time on the computer they get brainwashed. I am going to teach them examples of bad netiquette and discuss this with the class-perhaps they have some examples they would like to share.

3. Digital Literacy: going along with digital etiquette, I cannot wait to teach my students about digital literacy. I want my students to know that computers are a very powerful tool and that it is crucial for them to know how to create and use information using this tool. So many of our kids don't have research skills that they think that they can just copy what they read and that is their research. This goes back to bad "netiquette"-plagiarsim. Digital literacy is not just being able to read the information and write it out again, literacy is reading, writing and actually understanding what it is you wrote. It is also having others able to read what you wrote. I would like for my students to be able to read something on the internet for example and be able to evaluate whether it is important to use, does it make sense? Is it correct? This is what digital literacy consists of and I plan on teaching this to my students by having whole group discussions, working in small groups with my kids on the ipod touches as well as netbooks. I would like to incorporate this with "netiquette".