Tool #10

Digital Citizenship

What do I want my students to understand about digital citizenship:

1. Respect your own privacy on-line: keep your passwords private, lock your smart phone, be very careful sharing personal information, be very carful deciding what photos and videos to share on line. What you posted on line yesterday may still exist even if you deleted it today. 
2. Respect the privacy of others on-line: be respectful of others when you post comments. Know what cyberbullying is, don't engage in it, and report it when you see it. 
3. Always use multiple sources: not all information on the internet is valid. Using multiple sources can help you spot misleading or incorrect information. You may only need to check Wikipedia to find the year the Magna Carta was signed, but you might need multiple sources to understand its impact.
4. Learn to be evaluate what you find on the web. We need to teach students how to check who is sponsoring a web page and how to evaluate the information they find. 

I signed up for a teacher account on the Common Sense Media web site, http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educator. I looked at some of the lessons for high school students. I thought they were good. They have a lesson on what a college admission officer might find if he did a google search for an applicant. They even had a sample Facebook page where the students in the class could identify the information that the sample student might want an admission officer to see. I also liked the activity where students looked through samples of suspicious emails to identify signs that they were fraudulent. 

Before using Edmodo, or any other program that requires students to post on line, I think we need to talk about ground rules for on line behavior as a class. I can type up a description of what we are doing and a set of expectations for on line behavior. The students and their parents can then both sign the handout. 

To share the idea of digital citizenship with parents I can include a paragraph about what we are doing on line onto my couse syllabus/class information sheet. I usually give my students two copies of this handout on the first day of class. One copy if for them to keep in their notebook and the other has to be signed by both the parents and the students.