Baby Steps

I teach at an inner west school in Sydney. We are currently undergoing a transformation. That is we are trying to become a 21st century school. Ironicaly, the building I teach in is heritage listed but I digress.
By studying digital citizenship this semester, I am becoming more familiar with what it means to be a digital citizen. My teaching practice is being changed in that I am seeing the activities that the children and I participate online through a different filter. That is, I see them through the filter of digital citizenship and its different aspects such as safety, netiquette, maintaining a digital reputation, global participation and respecting other people's property.
I now understand that to be an effective teacher one must establish a Personal Learning Network of educators and for me, teacher librarians, in other places.  I am still coming to terms with the practicalities of this and probably due to the changing nature of Web 2.0 tools this will be an ongoing process. For me personally, this is appealing because I like to experiment but I know for some teachers it is a frightening and threatening idea. I think if you think it is okay to make mistakes then it is okay to give something new a try.
We are rewriting our policies to do with this area at school. I am involved in rewriting the ICT policy in which we are including references to digital citizenship throughout the policy. I now realise that digital citizenship, starts from when the children start to consciously use a device. So for example, in Kindergarten that means teaching them to remember to log off and how to go about doing that. I have been stressing to my fellow policy authors that the policies and the scope and sequence we are writing will always be a draft because the nature of technology and education is that changes. I understand that this is a daunting prospect for many teachers but if we look at that it is okay to take baby steps then we will be able to transform the way we teach and learn.