ETL523 Activity 2

Activity #2 ETL 523

Exploring and discussing relevant resources for your needs

Review two or more of these sites and consider how useful they may be to you and/or your school in developing an approach and a curriculum for digital citizenship:

Cyber Safe Kids: An online resource for children and parents (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cybersafekids.com.au

This site is useful because it has been designed for an Australian audience of both parents,, teachers and children.

The Advice Sheets are a very practical part of the site.They include information about cybersafety, bullying and cyberbullying. They have sheets aimed at adults, primary aged and secondary aged children.

In some ways it could be more explicit in its explanations about certain topics. For example, in the article about Online Grooming ( “Online Grooming”, n.d. parar.8) it mentions security settings without explaining what they are or how to change them. This could be confusing to some parents.

Despite this, the teaching resources are explicit and adaptable. They are genuienly aimed at all year levels and can be adapted to any lesson containing digital content. These resources can be found at Cyber Teach Toolkit – Safe and Responsible Use of Digital Technologies (Cyber Teach Toolkit – Safe and Responsible Use of Digital Technologies, 2013). They could be used at my school as a set of tools to use when teaching using digital technologies. As my school is moving towards BYOD, digital citizenship will need to be taught in the classroom on an ongoing basis.

The other site that I am reviewing in this post is iCyberSage.com – Living in a connected world (2014). Retireved from http://icybersafe.com

This website is a good way for parents of our school community to keep up with current trends in the world of social media. In a primary school, such as ours, the sites they discuss probably are not being used by our children. However, it would provide the tools for the parents to know what their younger children are doing and what their older chidlren are doing. Although it is mostly aimed at parents of teenagers it does have some articles and links for these parents. On the whole, this website is more useful for parents of teenage children, and as such, it would  be one of a group of websites that I would recommend to parents of primary aged children. That is, it as it not aimed specifically at younger children, it would need to be grouped with other sites for it to be sufficiently useful to our parent body.

ETL523 Activity #1 Sharing digital citizenship and DLE (Digital Learning Environment) ideas

This post is in answer to questions asked as part of ETL523, Module 1. 

1. What is your definition of digital citizenship? 

If you are a citizen, then you are a member of a community. In this case, it means a member of a world wide digital community and as such there are guidelines for your behaviour as part of that group. Digital citizenship means that a person behaves in a responsible, safe and ethical manner in the digital realm (Greenhow, 2010, para 3).

2. What is your stance on digital citizenship?

I think that one's view of digital citizenship has a range of different elements and that these elements are affected by cultural and social factors. What I mean by this is often what is considered responsible and safe in one context may not be accepted as such in another context. For example, during the webinar in which Julie Lindsay spoke, she talked to us about a group of Muslim students who had to be very careful how they interacted digitally as compared with students here. Another example, is the age of the student. That is, what is appropriate behaviour for a child over 13, is not considered safe for one under 13 years of age.

3. What should an informed, publicly engaged digital citizen look like?
If they are an informed, publicly engaged digital citizen then they should:

•  have a PLN that is constantly developing
•  be willing to experiment with different digital tools
•  be using tools  at home that  should be similar to the ones they use at work/school
•  be aware of maintaining a positive digital footprint
•  be curating information and contributing to the compilations and blogs of  others.

4. What direction are you (or your school) taking?

My school and I, I hope, are starting to be in sync. Our principal is very innovative and after the teachers and executive have attended the Future Schools Conference I think they are now starting to understand what I have been saying for a while about using the library and the digital tools in the school differently. 

I am hoping to survey the students and the teachers to find our what sort of digital citizens they really are and what I can do to assist them. 

I would like to see the  school reach out to each other and to the wider community by collaborating. There is a e-backpack developed by the department and each child has access to this. I will be experimenting with this and posting about this in the future.

Greenhow, C. (2010). New concept of citizenship for the digital age. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37(6), 24-25.