Digital Citizenship
First of all I am going to go back in the 80's when I was in high school and digital citizenship was something that was not even talked about. As I think about today's times and raising teens , the time of social media and cyber bullying is here. It is very important to not only educate students but parents also. Each year at the beginning, our school puts on a small fifteen minute session to parents about social media and cyber bullying. It is a big turn out each year.
In our readings this week, Orech talks about how using social media and teaching students how to protect their information go hand and hand (Orech,). It is so important to make students understand that whenever they are online posting pictures, making a comment, there is always a trail behind of what they have created and posted. For many students, they don't understand what it really means when teachers say the words "digital citizenship". We first must break down what citizenship is and what it means to be a "good citizen". Authentic information given to students helps with overall understanding of why it is important to create a student full of knowledge about the wonderful world of social media.
Here is a video that I found when searching for my upper grades . Here is a great video that is narrated by a student.
With reading so many things about the cyber bulling and the seven deadly sins of why cyber bullying exists, it creates easy access to how students bully each other with words and pictures. One thing that students tend to is give out password information that is harmful for security reasons. Students are trustworthy in how they relay their information. I have found within my classroom settings, students who can't remember their passwords, use each others to be able to sign into their student issued chrome books. I use one of my students for example. A student from two years ago decided to give a student their password only for that student to visit inappropriate sites. Because of this, he was suspended from his chrome book for a month because it was his userid that was signed in to the inappropriate site. This was a great lesson to him and his classmates. I use this lesson each year with my upper grades. With my lower grades, a district wide video is sent out through our district coordinators to show lower grade students.
Within the schools, I find that many teachers and students don't know what copyright means and how not to break rules about copyrights. Students will grab pictures off of Google and site it as google images but in all certainty, Google compiles their images from many different sources ( Davis, 2014). Copyright infringements is important to understand and needs to be addressed.
One of the tools through research that I found to be informative is a cyber bullying symbaloo. This symbaloo creates a great way to gather many resources on cyber bullying and a tool students can use to go back to as a reminder. This creates great dialog between the student and the teacher to collaborate on the ideas of how to stay away from cyber bullying, how to report it and what is cyber bullying.
When doing some research of cyber bullying and studying the readings, I found this chart that really put cyber bullying in a picture for me.
This is a survey completed by broadbandsearch.net . It shows issues kids start to face and feel as the result of cyber bullying.
Cyber Bullying affects many children of today at all ages. It was eye opening to me to see what comes with the end results of kids being cyber bullied. It is a subject that can not be swept under the rug and has to be monitored at all times. It is important to create a clear picture of the wrongs of using social media in the wrong ways.
resources:
broadbandsearch.net
Orech, J. (2012). "How it's done" Incorporating digital citizenship into your everyday curriculum". Tech and Learning 33 (1). 16-18
