Teacher's Guide to Digital Citizenship The horror stories of young people not grasping the reach and influence of the content they put online are familiar to all of us. From the loss of job opportunities due to unprofessional pictures or comments on social media, to the more serious threats of abduction, and even the self-harm inspired by cyber bullying, the stakes are high. While students may often seem clueless to these dangers, some are starting to understand the risks. In a recent Rasmussen study on digital literacy, details of which you can see in the infographic below, 37% of millennials aged 18 – 34 said they consider the internet scary, which is more than any other demographic. Still, millennials know just as well as any other demographic just how important digital literacy is and will continue to be to their working lives. Image courtesy of Flickr and Thomas Galvez Why Digital Citizenship Matters Neither educators nor parents have the means to completely control how students use technology. Online Safety
Online Safety: A Teacher’s Guide to Dealing with Cyberbullying, Sexting, and Student Privacy Social media and text messages have blurred the lines between students’ school lives and private lives. While most schools take clear steps to protect students at school, more schools are beginning to consider the need to set policies that apply to students’ activities outside of school. When it comes to questionable online activities like cyberbullying and sexting, kids sometimes feel pressured to follow the crowd. Teachers can play a crucial role in setting high expectations for online behavior. Image via Flickr by Brad Flickinger. Privacy Since the birth of the Internet, adults have been worried about kids sharing too much online. On the plus side, teens are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect themselves online. What can you do? Have students commit to following school rules. Cyberbullying Social media and text messages are vital to many students’ social lives. Get students involved. Sexting Check whether your school or district has a policy on sexting. Now, Keep up
Digital Literacy: Unlocking Technology's Potential | edu@scholastic With 1:1 technology initiatives and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programs increasingly being implemented in schools across the globe, the need for digital literacy education has become more important than ever. Although technology enables students to access more information in much less time, it does not always foster learning. Teaching digital literacy helps to manage all of the benefits of technology while helping students understand how to safely weed through the vast amounts of information online. Technology in the classroom has the following advantages: Allows students to manipulate information and media to construct their own meaningsEnables students to share their ideas quickly and easilyEngages students of all cognitive levels and abilitiesPrepares students to be college and career ready These benefits, among others, are why technology has become a major part of the global curriculum. Educators need to embrace the creative and collaborative aspects of digital literacy.
Why online harassment is still ruining lives -- and how we can stop it In 2010, Anthony Elonis threatened his estranged wife by writing rants on his Facebook page such as, "There's one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts." For making these threats, a federal district court sentenced him to more than three years in prison. On June 1, the Supreme Court voided that conviction, explaining that the standard the court had used to judge whether Elonis's threats were "true threats" was not sufficient. The district court had asked jurors to consider only whether the threats would cause a reasonable person to be afraid. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that juries should also consider whether the defendant intended to make a true threat. If only everyone would follow that lead. And yet online harassment largely goes unchecked, and not only in the cases that make headlines. Local law enforcement doesn’t always know how to enforce online harassment laws.
Social Media at School: Teaching Safety on the Virtual Playground | Edutopia These days, social media gets a pretty bad rap. It seems like every other day there is a celebrity apology or a story about a teen who commits suicide due to cyberbullying. It's true, social media can breed some pretty awful stuff. And that awful stuff is great material for the digital citizenship unit that all of my school's incoming freshmen are expected to complete. Acceptable Use Our school is unique in Philadelphia in that it's one of the few public schools with a 1:1 program that allows students to take devices home. Let's face it -- teenagers are on social media in school and out of school, even if their parents have told them they can't be, and even if the school has rules about being on phones during school hours. In my class, we start the year with the book, lol. . .OMG by Matt Ivester. Always Learning It is through these discussions that I learn about how students use social media, what their experiences have been, and what their beliefs are.
Why Teens Are Impulsive, Addiction-Prone And Should Protect Their Brains iStock By NPR Staff Teens can’t control impulses and make rapid, smart decisions like adults can — but why? Research into how the human brain develops helps explain. “Teenagers are not as readily able to access their frontal lobe to say, ‘Oh, I better not do this,’ ” Dr. Jensen, who’s a neuroscientist and was a single mother of two boys who are now in their 20s, wrote The Teenage Brain to explore the science of how the brain grows — and why teenagers can be especially impulsive, moody and not very good at responsible decision-making. “We have a natural insulation … called myelin,” she says. This insulation process starts in the back of the brain and heads toward the front. “The last place to be connected — to be fully myelinated — is the front of your brain,” Jensen says. This research also explains why teenagers can be especially susceptible to addictions — including drugs, alcohol, smoking and digital devices. Interview Highlights On why teenagers are more prone to addiction Related
20 Basic Rules For Digital Citizenship The definition of digital citizenship has to do with the quality of behaviors that impact the quality of digital content and communities. To help clarify what that “quality” can look like, knowthenet.org.uk put together the following infographic framed around Dos and Don’ts. While seemingly written for a more general audience than students and educators, the thinking is sound, including “Treat others they way you want to be treated,” “Don’t forget the human behind the screen,” “Listen first, talk later,” and “Use proper grammar.” (Yes, please do.) Overall it’s a bit basic, but it does take the important step of moving beyond rhetoric to offer concrete tips to realize the idea. 20 Basic Rules For Digital Citizenship
Yik Yak app concerns P.E.I. high school - A smartphone app that allows users to post anonymous comments that only other users in close proximity can see is gaining popularity among students, but it has officials at P.E.I.'s largest high school concerned. "As each day goes by, more and more students seem to be getting affected by this site," said Gordie Cox, a guidance counsellor at Colonel Gray high school. Students told CBC News that Yik Yak started to become popular in early December and has led to trash-talking because users are anonymous. Colonel Gray students say Yik Yak has been growing in popularity since early December. Const. "There are students that aren't attending school because of it. Geo-fencing offered In an email to CBC News, Yik Yak said, "We recognize that with any social app or network, there is the likelihood for misuse from a small group of users, so we have put specific algorithms in place and continue to improve our monitoring tools to prevent this from happening." 'Answer is education'
Why Schools Need to Teach Technology, Not Ban It Image courtesy @LBPSB During my last seven years as a teacher and consultant, I have borne witness to the technological digital shift in education. When I began my education career in 2005 at the tender age of 23, I had little idea what I was about to face. I was given an unheard of mixture of classes and was thrown to the sharks wearing my new heels and best “teacher” clothes. Looking back to when I began teaching, I can now appreciate what was developing. By my second year of teaching I had become the media teacher (along with a long list of other subjects) and was introduced (by a student of course) to Facebook, founded only a few years before. As an educator or parent it is easy to forget how quickly things changed in those few years. Where do we go from here? Block, filter, take away, confiscate. The problem with this approach is that it does not work. What are we really accomplishing with this approach? Do we educate? What does digital citizenship education look like? The Lester B.
Online Safety Redefined: The 3 Key Elements | Stephen Balkam Online safety has come of age. It is 21 years since "Child Safety on the Information Highway" was first published by journalist and online safety expert, Larry Magid. A year later, after the release of the notorious Rimm Study and the Time Magazine cover article on porn on the Internet, the U.S. Senate Judiciary held Congress' first ever hearing on the subject. In 1996, my own organization launched what would become the world's leading content labeling system for websites, linked to filters that parents could use to control what their kids could see on the Internet. Since then we've had what one observer called a "technopanic" over online predators, which reached its apotheosis (or nadir) in NBC Dateline's To Catch a Predator. Kids now create the content we used to try and keep them away from and they do it with immensely powerful devices they carry around with them in their pockets. So it behooves us to take a step back and ask ourselves what we mean by online safety in 2015. 1. 2. 3.
Man Regrets Posting Video on Facebook of Paris Cop's Killing PARIS — When Ahmed Coulibaly laid siege to a kosher supermarket in Paris last week, the bloody assault which left four hostages dead came as a shock — but not a surprise — to many Jews in France. The number of French Jews emigrating to Israel has jumped dramatically in recent years thanks to an uptick in perceived anti-Semitism, according to The Jewish Agency. The agency — a nonprofit which facilitates emigration to Israel, which is known as "aliyah" — said 7,000 people moved from France last year — double the 2013 total. While those numbers were expected to rise to 10,000 for 2015, such estimates are now being revised in wake of Friday's brutal attack on the Hyper Cacher store. "A lot of people thought that it was only a matter of time for something like this to happen," agency spokesman Avi Mayer told NBC News. "There's a sense among many French Jews that it's simply unsafe to identify openly as a Jew in the street of France. "People are terrified," Simone Rodan-Benzaquen said.
Teach Them Kindness Posted by Shelly Terrell on Sunday, December 21st 2014 Included in the Digital Ideas Advent Calendar with a new idea each day! Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change. – Bob Kerrey Teaching citizenship isn’t an additional part of the curriculum. A good lesson plan or project will get students to learn how to be kind, generous, problem-solving, caring, compassionate, imaginative, creative, emphatic, and/or helpful while also getting them to learn. Ideas and Activities The slideshow below provides students ideas on how to be kind in small quick ways. Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad Make an advent calendar in which everyday you suggest a small way for your students to be kind. Other Resources Challenge: Inspire your students to perform at least 5 simple acts of kindness and reflect on the experience. BookmarksDigital storytelling, by shellyterrell Included in the Digital Ideas Advent Calendar!
Excellent Chart Comparing The Best Digital Storytelling Tools of 2014 December 26, 2014 Digital storytelling is a power way to get students engaged in learning. Using a variety of web tools students will be able to experiment with a set of important skills and literacies in a multimodal environment. They can use text, audio , video, images to communicate their ideas and enhance their visual literacy and writing competencies. Some of the pluses of digital storytelling in education include: You can access and download the Google Doc version of these charts from this LINK. Pleased To Tweet You: National #DigCitSummit on October 3rd! | Digital Citizenship Summit In 2011, Digital Citizenship Summit co-founder, Dr. Marialice B.F.X. Curran created and taught a First Year Seminar at the University of Saint Joseph called, ‘Pleased to Tweet You: Are You a Socially Responsible Digital Citizen?’ This course propelled Curran into the national spotlight as she became recognized as an expert in digital citizenship and social media in K-12 education. Her First Year Seminar, #FYS11 was also the beginning of her iCitizen Project research and provided the inspiration behind planning and hosting the iCitizenship Town Hall Meeting at the University of Saint Joseph in February 2012. Since 2011 she has helped organize five conferences in Connecticut – four at the University of Saint Joseph and one at the Ethel Walker School for the first EdcampCT. Fast forward to 2014 when Curran met David R. Like this: Like Loading...