I will include the link to the prezi viewing site as well if you would like to view it outside the blog post.
Digital Citizenship is an NETS*S standard that I will explore in depth in this post.
This is a very pressing and important topic to address with students because students need to know how to be citizens in the digital world. They need to learn their words and actions online have real world consequences. There has been too many cases of students committing suicide because they have been bullied online.
However digital citizenship does not cover just issues like saftey and cyberbullying. When I first started learning about educational technology I always thought about digital citzenship as saftey measures and watching what you say online. However the ISTE website outlined a few other elements to the standard. It took me a while to wrap my brain around how these ideas fit under digital citizenship. Slowly as a thought about what it meant to be a citizen in a country or anywhere else it began to make sense. If you are a citizen of a country then you must have a good attitude about being a citizen, part of being a citizen is teaching those around what that means, and you must continue to learn about what it means to be a citizen since the world is always changing. I want to analyze these a little closer.
First let me talk about having a good attitude. I think that if you are a citizen of a country, town, school, or any other community that you are there because part of you wants to be there. If you don't have a good attitude about being a citizen of that community then you would be in a different one. Students need to enjoy being a part of the digital community and approach learning about technology with a good attitude. It reminds of when my dad gave me an HP graphing calculator. At the time he was working for HP and he was very adament on only having HP products in the house. So for the longest time I never used a mac because when you live in a town where most people in the town are employed by HP then you run across a lot of HP computers. I didn't realize how popular mac computers were until I went to college where tons of students had them including my roomate. There were of course labs with just mac computers in them as well. I adjusted to using them, but it took sometime. I digress let us get back to talking about my HP calculator. My math teacher taught the class using a TI calculator and I had no idea how to use the HP one. I tried learning how to multiply matrices on the calculator and just couldn't figure out how to store so I could refer to it in the home screen. I gave up using it after a while and borrowed a TI from my teacher. I think I went into learning about that calculator with a bad attitude because I didn't get a choice in my calculator and I was using to make my dad happy not because I was interested. I eventually bought a TI calculator, but did not really tell my dad that I did until much later. I have since learned to do a lot on a TI-89 calculator as I have been teaching my Calculus students to use it. I am continually shocked at what the TI89 calculator can do. So are my students because after teaching them how to graph slope fields on their calculator one of my students said that "the calculator is omnipitent". I think another piece about having a good attitude is also being able to deal with technology and not get frustrated. Often things don't work like we want them to or we just can't figure out how to do something. As I was making my presentation to summarize these thoughts I struggled with having a good attitude because the internet was being slow and the prezi was not responding like I wanted. I first debated doing a google presentation because that is easy to use and I have done it before. I didn't really want to try something new because I new I would get frustrated at not knowing how to get the presentation just like I want it. However I decided it would be fun to try something different for once. It is that attitude that are students need. I did struggle at getting the presentation just right, but then I stepped away from the project for a while and found a solution that accomplished presenting the information I wanted. It was then that I thought of including screenr videos into the presentation since that quickly showed you the resources I wanted to share with you. I will include the links to those resources at the end of the post. So are students need to have a good attitude about working with technology and take some time to really think through their options. This is a really hard concept to teach and instill in our students. I have about this idea of teaching attitude for a while because part of the reason I wanted to teach math was so that I could teach students to have a good attitude. Many times when I told people I was a math major they often responded with something about how they hate math and are bad at it. I am determined to use pedagogy and activities in my math class that makes it so less students say that they hate math. I want them to see how fun math can be. They may never see math as fun as I think it is, but that is ok. If they have a good attitude for learning math it help them learn better, want to learn, and help them in later math classess they most likely will have to take. This idea also applies to learning about digital cintizenship and technology. If they have a good attitude for learning about digital citizenship and technology then it will help them learn better, want to learn about new digital issues and new digital skills, and help them later in life as they will most likely be forced to use some form of technology in their daily life.
Next I want to talk about how leadership relates to digtal citizenship. I think that we as citizens in our community teach others what it means to be a part of that community. We tell others the rules about being in that community and often advocate for people in the community to do certain things. I know that since I am a teacher I am a leader in my community. I am being a role model for students and trying to teach the students how to be citizens. Something I have realized after living in China is that I am a citizen of America and I am a citizen of Oregon, but I am also a global citizen. What I do and say here in china makes impressions on people from around the world. I am trying to teach my students so that they too can become global citizens. I try to model global citizenship through my words and actions for the students. This idea of leadership also extends to digital citizenship. Our have to adovcate for people to carefully consider issues dealing with digital citizenship. Students also need to be able to teach others digital skills so that their community benefits from everyones digital contributions. Students also need to be empowered to speak up about students being bullied online. Our students need to be able to improve their community and help to make change. They could help shape how technology is used and potententially not used.
Last I want to talk about being a lifelong learner. I think the last two aspects fold into life long learning. You need to have a good attitude about learning to continue to do so. Also if you are commited to being a life long learner then you will be a better leader. It took me a while to think about how this tied into citizenship, but I think that citizens need to be commited to continuing their education about their community and improving their community. This applies to the digital community and digital skills as well. Students need to continue to learn technology. As technology becomes more and more apart of our daily life they will have to continue to learn how to use and how to be a good digital citizen. They will also eventually go into the job force where they will be asked and encouraged to use new technology. I recently went to Laos with a friend to visit their family who were living and working there. I was talking to my friends family about the Lao people and their culture. They mentioned to me that the foreign company they work for is pushing the Lao staff to use this online database at work. The Lao people refuse to use it because they don't know how and either don't know how to learn to use or won't learn to use it. Whatever the reasons it just shows that people need to be prepared to contine to learn about technology and not be afraid to use it. However the Laos situation is a little different since most of the population does not have lots of access to the internet and technology. Many places are not equiped with high level technology. I flew to a couple of cities in Laos and when I went to the airport in Laos to buy my plane tickets I was shocked at how low tech the airport was. This was the airport in the captiol city Vientianne. I bought the plane tickets the day of and the teller used one of the oldeset computers I had seen. Then when I went to go check in for my flight the security officer had a printed list of passengers, but of course my name was not on it since I had just bought my tickets like twenty minutes ago. He took a pen and wrote my name down on the passenger list. My friend had her name mispelled on her boarding pass because the teller made a typo when she was entering in the information on that really old computer. However no one stopped her despite the fact the name did not match the one on her passport. Also since it is a communist country they control the education greatly and don't not advocate for crticial thinking skills and technology. So this foreign company was not working on being leaders in digital citizenship since they did not provide training sessions on how to use the technology and they were not showing their workers how to be lifelong learners. Our students may face the same problem when they go into the workforce and are asked to use online tools and other programs. So we as educators need to instill that sense of lifelong learning in our students.
Now for the last piece of digital citizenship which is safety. I had always thought of issues surronding safety, privacy, and ethics when I thought of digital citizenship. I think that is what comes to mind first when people think about digital citizenship not the other aspects I have already focused on. Students need to know how to proctect their identity, information, and ideas when working online. This is where cyberbulling also comes in. Students need to know how important it is to make the digital world a safe one for others. They also need to know about how the digital world often is not a safe place because of hackers, scams, and people pretending to be something they are not. ANother issue related to saftey is knowing how much to share about yourself online. There was a recent incident here in China where a young girl would constantly post her location on the Chinese version of twitter (since twitter is blocked in China). She also posted lots of photos of herself. This made it really easy for online users to find her in the real world. She ended up getting murdered and people suspected that the killer used the information she posted to track her down. Her murder was a horrible consequence for sharing so much personal information online. Students need to understand that they should watch what information they share with the public.
You should know though that the online community was very sad about her passing and many followers began an online memorial. Followers, fans, and others who heard about the story went to her profile and posted an image of a candle. Therefore the digital commuity can be very caring, supportive, and really come together. We need to continue to make the digital world a safe place and make people understand how to be a digital citizen.
So after thinking through all of these concepts I made this prezi presentation to sum up these thoughts. It takes you through an overview of what digital citizenship is and my thoughts about it. Then at the end of the journey, the real treasue, is presenting this in the classroom. I include two videos summarizing and outling two different ways to approach the topic of digital citizenship in the classroom. The lessons are geared towards high school students. I did not address how I would include this topic in my math classroom, but that is because I am not sure how I would do it. I have talked about how I teach about some of the principles of digital citizenship in my class, so hopefully students can transplant those principles and apply them to technology. I think that the standard on problem solving and critical thinking outlined by ISTE applies a lot in math. I often have to teach students how to solve technology problems when working with their calculator. I however can be a leader for digital citizenship and the digital community by teaching other teachers. I have already done this in during my time student teaching. I helped an English teacher at my school learn how to use Yodio and then compile the videos into a blog. If you think about the TPACK model she provided the content and the context while I provided the technology knowledge. We collaborated, discussed, and reflected on the pedagogy. She had to be absent one day during the project so I came into her class with the sub and helped the students with the Yodio program. I then came into the class when the videos were presented. I have also helped teachers here in China by showing them how to use the program I use to edit math equations.
I wanted to include links to the resources in the prezi presentation, but could not figure out how to do that. However I did see that I could upload a video into the presentation and thought about just visually showing them. So here are the resources I talked about.
The site that I got the above resources is free, easy to use, and you can download all of these. They have activities, rescources, and lesson plans for everything. They have these resources for many different age groups. I just looked at the resources for high school, but there is a lot more out there.
If you want to know more about digital citizenship you can read my other post which has many more links to resources and a video summarizing what I learned about digital citizenship at a technology conference.
If you want to know more about digital citizenship you can read my other post which has many more links to resources and a video summarizing what I learned about digital citizenship at a technology conference.
Here are some other good resources I found while researching this topic:
wiki page made through digital collaboration by many different schools around the world
Here are links to some of the digital tools I talked about in the presentation:
Yodio
Glogster
Screenr
Also I thought that I would mention that I used Vocaroo to record my voice overs for the prezi online then downloaded them to my computer. Once I downloaded them I clicked on the frame I wanted to include it and clicked on insert. Then chose to insert voice over.
Here are links to some of the digital tools I talked about in the presentation:
Yodio
Glogster
Screenr
Also I thought that I would mention that I used Vocaroo to record my voice overs for the prezi online then downloaded them to my computer. Once I downloaded them I clicked on the frame I wanted to include it and clicked on insert. Then chose to insert voice over.
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