October ITL Standard Focus: Digital Citizens

This month's focus: Digital Citizens, is perfect because October 14-18 is Digital Citizenship Week! Citizenship is something that we as educators teach and model ALL OF THE TIME! It is especially important more so now that we model this behavior online and give students opportunities to practice proper digital citizenship in the safe space of our classrooms.

Standard DC1 - Students recognize the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of living, learning, and working in an interconnected digital world.

This does NOT mean that you should have them all sign up for social media and connect with them there. In fact that is against Board Policy. But there are ways that you can get creative, model appropriate digital citizenship and engage your students. It means talking about privacy, not just having students agree to statements without reading what they are agreeing to. Making sure that students are on resources that we have permission for through our Web 2.0 permission slips and if it isn't on there getting that permission.

Standard: DC2 - Students will demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.

When students are searching for images in Google are you having them changing the search settings to make sure that it is licensed for use? Are they citing their sources in the appropriate format? Just having them share URLs is not acceptable with so many citation generators and ALL of the library resources having citations built right in. In my Computer Skills class we start talking about this in 2nd grade. It's as easy as copy and paste. Are you modelling copyright compliance? Are YOU sharing citation information for things that you photocopy?

https://www.flickr.com/people/info_grrl/

Resources on this topic can be found:

• Wisconsin DPI- This resource page got a major overhaul and update recently and there are a TON of resources for teachers and families. It is organized in multiple ways, one being audience and the other being individual specific topics related to Digital Citizenship.
• Common Sense Media-SO many good resources here, they even have links to some Kahoots! Kahoots can get very competitive but can also lead to so many conversations. They also have toolkits and curriculum that you can use right away! 
• Be Internet Awesome-Google came out with their own curriculum (that has slideshows already together and step-by-step lessons) that can be done in a 30 minute block that are current and up to date with student's lives. There is also an interactive game Interland where students can practice their smarts.