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Video Playlist: Educating Digital Citizens

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Video Playlist: Educating Digital Citizens

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Digital Literacy, or the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, is an essential skill in the modern world. People need to be more than just tech savvy; they must also be able to leverage technology efficiently and responsibly.

We've put together a playlist showing how teachers are educating students on a number of different technology-related issues, including security, research, and etiquette.

1. Super Digital Citizen: What does it mean to be a digital citizen? How can you use the Internet safely, responsibly, and effectively? Mr. Pane's lesson helps students answer these questions and more.

2. Exploring Copyrights and Wrongs: Explore how copyrights function. Teach students how to ethically use and cite others' works in their own projects.

3. Improving Research Skills with Effective Keywords: Ms. Ramos has her class practice performing Internet searches by having them experiment with different combinations of words.

4. Using Critical Thinking to Find Trustworthy Websites: Ms. Koch's middle schoolers learn to evaluate websites as potential sources of information. They then incorporate their research into a presentation, citing it as evidence.

5. Exploring the Concept of Online Privacy: Dr. Johnson makes Internet privacy real for her class by connecting it to their everyday lives. She provides students with a copy of the terms and conditions of a popular website, and has them draw their own conclusions about what right to privacy they have under these terms.

6. Understanding the Impact of Digital Footprints: Mr. Van Dyck talks about digital footprints, helping students understand how important it is to carefully curate what kind of information they make public on the Internet.

7. Overexposed: Sexting and Relationships: Ms. Pentland discusses the sensitive topic of sexting with a high school class, focusing on what constitutes sexting, and the negative consequences associated with this kind of virtual communication.

8. Teaching Email Etiquette: Ms. Jizba begins versing her elementary school students in digital literacy by having them draft a business email to their principal. This lesson can be scaffolded to older students as well, particularly as they prepare to apply for jobs or attend college.
Elizabeth Weiland is Teaching Channel's Advertising and Licensing Account Manager. Follow her on Twitter, @ElizabetWeiland.

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Video Playlist: Educating Digital Citizens

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Digital Literacy, or the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, is an essential skill in the modern world. People need to be more than just tech savvy; they must also be able to leverage technology efficiently and responsibly.

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URL vs IRL #KidsDeserveIt | kidsdeserveit

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URL vs IRL #KidsDeserveIt | kidsdeserveit

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This is a guest post from Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner is the Social Media Manager at GoGuardian, an edtech software company providing device management solutions that keep students safer online and make teaching easier. Learn more at goguardian.com.

Today's students find themselves in a situation that earlier generations never had to face, and must learn how to navigate two separate lives: URL and IRL. This means that students must learn how to behave not only in their day-to-day, IRL lives (IRL, or, in real life), but also in their online lives (URL, or uniform resource locator, the address of websites). Learning and understanding how to become a valued member of the internet means learning how to become an outstanding digital citizen, which is more important than ever due to the massive technology integration in schools across the globe.

In the modern classroom -- and in the modern, highly connected workplace that today's students will enter -- the value of technology as an instructional resource is increasingly embraced by educators, parents, and students alike. With the new opportunities for more robust and cost-effective resources that technology facilitates, however, come new risks and potential consequences that were not a concern for students in a pre-digital era.

While appropriate monitoring of student's Internet usage is essential, teaching students to be proactive by keeping themselves safe and responsible online is the best way to prevent online abuses, like cyberbullying and contact from predators, and privacy breaches,which are often the result of oversharing online.

Teaching students these eight rules will help ensure their online interactions remain positive, and empower them to be responsible digital citizens for the rest of their lives.

Be careful what you share! Comments, social media posts, photos, and anything else you share online is not guaranteed to be protected from online predators or hackers, even if you're sharing only to specific people on password-protected sites. Always remember the golden rule of the internet: only post things that you're okay with everyone seeing.

Be safe. Although being safe online is a large, important topic, it is different from being a good digital citizen, and carries different ramifications. It's crucial to never divulge any personal information, like passwords, home addresses, phone numbers, and other information that identifies you with someone you don't know. For more detailed information on Internet safety tips, read post for parents about keeping .

Four Digital "Don'ts"

Considering giving students their own devices for classwork and homework? Get all the expert advice and tips for every stage of the process with the Educator's Complete Digital Learning Guide.

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This is a guest post from Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner is the Social Media Manager at GoGuardian, an edtech software company providing device management solutions that keep students safer online and make teaching easier. Learn more at goguardian.com.

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Control Alt Achieve: 4 Fake Sites to Teach Students Website Evaluation

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Control Alt Achieve: 4 Fake Sites to Teach Students Website Evaluation

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As adults we (hopefully) know that not everything online is true. For our students though, this is a concept they need to learn.

Students can use Google to quickly find millions of websites matching their search request, but are they able to determine which sites actually contain information that is accurate, unbiased, up to date, and written by someone with authority?

One step in helping our students identify quality information online is to introduce them to the exact opposite... websites that pretend to be truthful but actually are full of intentionally incorrect information.

Such "fake" websites can be a great way to show students that just because something is online, does not mean it is true. You can ask students to do research on one of these sites as part of an assignment and then see how many were able to realize the site was not authentic. This can be a fun and engaging way to begin a lesson on website evaluation.

Now you might think this would be easy to do since there are so many sites online that are biased or misleading. However, if we are going to use these sites with students we need to look for certain characteristics:

Believable - The fake website needs to look not fake. That is, it should look reasonably modern and not like a practical joke from the late 90's.

Child Safe - The site needs to avoid inappropriate content. There are loads of hoax / humor / satirical websites, but many of them have adult content not suitable for students (for example, I think The Onion can be hilarious, but it is absolutely not appropriate for education).

Operational - Sadly many of the great fake websites of the past are no longer maintained, or have shut down entirely.

So what are some great websites that meet these criteria, and that you can use with your students to help them learn how to evaluate online information? Below are four of my favorite "fake" sites...

Dihydrogen Monoxide
http://www.dhmo.org
One of the oldest and still one of the best, this website provides loads of scientific data on the dangers of a common substance called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Of course, two hydrogens and one oxygen make up H2O, so it is just a fancy sounding name for plain old water. This is a particularly good site for older students as the content it more advanced and the site has a more academic look and feel.

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus
This hoax website is easily one of the best looking sites, which goes a long way to making it look credible. On the site you will learn all about the amazing Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, complete with believable photos, videos, and downloadable plans to build your own tree octopus house.

All About Explorers
http://allaboutexplorers.com
One quick glance at this website and you will be reminded of countless educational webquest sites from years gone by. Students can choose from many explorers and read a detailed, but highly incorrect, biography for each. The site is specifically educational though as they provide lesson plan activities that have the students compare and contrast the information found on the site with other reputable online sources.

Dog Island
http://www.thedogisland.com
And finally there is Dog Island, a wonderful location where thousands of dogs live natural, healthy, and happy lives. Be sure to check out the facilities, photos, and see how you can send your dog to this canine paradise!

What other sites or online content have you used with your students to help them learn about website evaluation? Share your links and ideas in the comments below.

Post by Eric Curts. Bring me to your school, organization, or conference with over 50 PD sessions to choose from. Connect with me on Twitter at twitter.com/ericcurts and on Google+ at plus.google.com/+EricCurts1

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4 Fake Sites to Teach Students Website Evaluation

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As adults we (hopefully) know that not everything online is true. For our students though, this is a concept they need to learn. Students can use Google to quickly find millions of websites matching their search request, but are they able to determine which sites actually contain information that is accurate, unbiased, up to date, and written by someone with authority?

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How You Can Become a Champion of Digital Citizenship in Your Classroom | EdSurge News

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How You Can Become a Champion of Digital Citizenship in Your Classroom | EdSurge News

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My students often travel with me when I lead professional development at conferences. A few weeks ago, eight-year-old Carson Griffin (pictured here to the right) was helping me lead a session for teachers on "iPads for Elementary Learners," and we were talking about our classroom Twitter account as it applies to digital citizenship. I called Carson to the front of the room to share his thoughts on Digital Citizenship, and his response gave me goosebumps.

"You should never post anything negative about a teacher, coach, or others on social media because they could find it and you will feel foolish," he said. "If my coach doesn't play me in soccer, I should not post bad stuff about them. I could be kicked off the team."

But he didn't stop there. "Even if you think it is deleted, it can always be found... Ask yourself: is it true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind? If it's not, you shouldn't be posting it online. When you grow up, you use technology and your digital footprint to get you into jobs."

I'm not sure if it was the teachers' reactions, the fact that he so beautifully recited this during the summer, or that I know I helped him secure his future in second grade that made this such a powerful moment for everyone in the room. I teared up on the spot.

Our students are constantly connected with each other and the world through their devices. In fact, the students in my second grade classroom have never lived without WiFi or mobile devices. They have never felt the pain of dial-up internet or T9 texting. But... how can we ensure that what our students are doing on these devices is appropriate and meaningful?

Why Digital Citizenship is No Longer Just an "Elective"

As teachers, it is now part of our responsibility to lead by example when it comes to sound digital citizenship practices. As soon as children have devices in their hands, they should be educated about digital citizenship and their digital footprint. Think about this: even before babies are born, they have a digital shadow, because pictures and other media are shared about them via various social media outlets.

There is a startling statistic that 93 percent of employers now use social media in some way to either recruit or hire employees. That means that if I don't educate students about digital citizenship, they may end up having a poor or neutral digital footprint--which means they have a 7 percent chance of getting hired. While media specialists teach these skills, it is essential that classroom teachers are embedding it into their classroom curriculums as well as soon as students are online. We also can't assume that families are educating students about their digital footprint. In fact, this year, a mother told me that her son was teaching her about what was appropriate to post online--and she thanked me at our parent teacher conferences!

George Couros challenges teachers to make sure all students are well "Googleable" when they graduate, and I think this is a vital concept to embrace and take on. My students call me a "Digital Role Model," and I have to admit I like that title. They enjoy Googling me to check on my digital footprint, and see all of the places I've traveled to for conferences, or golf meets I competed in during college. They have full access to view my Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and blog. Knowing this reinforces my belief that I need to be a strong digital role model for them and lead by example. If I'm going to talk the talk, I better walk the walk.

Here's how you and your students can walk the walk in your own classroom, too. Let's start with resources.

Credit: George Couros

Resource Roundup

When it comes to resources to support teaching Digital Citizenship, there are several out there. A few favorites I use throughout the year include:

Planet Nutshell Videos: These are short videos that cover a variety of topics from cyberbullying to protecting personal information.

Common Sense Media: This amazing site has tons of FREE materials that are designed to empower students to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly in our digital world.

PBS Kids Webonauts Academy: The Webonauts Internet Academy empowers kids to make responsible and respectful decisions in their online interactions.Taking on the role of a Webonaut, kids explore a series of missions that teach key issues of web safety and digital citizenship.

But, keep in mind--I'm a huge fan of DIY when it comes to Digital Citizenship resources.

I created the main resource collection I use in my classroom to introduce Digital Citizenship and to fill the needs of my students. ( You can buy it here!) Some of the topics included in my resource center around keeping private information private, making safe and appropriate choices online, being respectful of others, reporting bullying, and citing sources.

Looking to make your own collection? Here's what I include:

Seven posters for classrooms with scripted mini-lessons and turn-and-talk discussion suggestions

A letter for parents (because the parent education piece is essential)

Student response readers

Differentiation options for intermediate learners

A "certificate of completion" for the students

After working through my resource, the work really begins. Students need to be given real world opportunities to begin building their digital footprint. My resource simply helps stir up the discussion and lay the foundation with your students.

Give Students Access--and Start Small

I'm a believer in guiding students through real world, authentic situations to teach them digital citizenship skills. If schools block students from everything, they may be "protecting" them temporarily during the school day. However, when schools teach students about their digital footprint and give them tools to use in real life situations, they protect students for a lifetime. So, for starters, allow students access to YouTube, search engines, and Twitter at school. Prepare them beforehand with extensive discussion and tools, and set them up for success.

One of my favorite ways I teach and instill Digital Citizenship in my classroom is through "Tweeter of the Day." I think it is vital to provide students with an authentic platform to show what they know and put their digital citizenship skills to the test. While having students update "tweets" on sentence strips on a bulletin board might have a purpose, it's not the same as providing them with the real thing.

Each day, a different Tweeter is assigned, and this role includes live tweeting our learning throughout the day, where the student starts with an introduction, and often will tweet learning, pictures, and sometimes videos. The Tweeter is also responsible for responding to tweets our account receives throughout the day, such as those that we received from global connections like Brad Waid and Jen Jones. All tweets are monitored by me as a teacher, but I am more of a facilitator and the account truly belongs to the students.

My challenge to teachers is always, "If it's right for kids, it's right." While jumping into technology or social media can be scary at first, the benefits of putting kids in authentic environments to hone their digital citizenship skills far outweigh those fears. Sometimes, the comfort level of teachers is less important than doing what's right for students as we prepare them for the future that waits for them when they leave school. We as teachers cannot play into those fears, or be the four walls that hold our students back.

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How You Can Become a Champion of Digital Citizenship in Your Classroom - EdSurge News

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My students often travel with me when I lead professional development at conferences. A few weeks ago, eight-year-old Carson Griffin (pictured here to the right) was helping me lead a session for teachers on "iPads for Elementary Learners," and we were talking about our classroom Twitter account as it applies to digital citizenship.

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Keeping your personal information safe - Episode 1 - Details, details on Vimeo

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Keeping your personal information safe - Episode 1 - Details, details on Vimeo

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Keeping your personal information safe - Episode 1 - Details, details

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Hector and his friends learn about their personal information—what it is, who should it be shared with and how can it be used.

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14 copyright essentials teachers and students must know | Ditch That Textbook

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14 copyright essentials teachers and students must know | Ditch That Textbook

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Students and teachers toe a very fuzzy ethical line every day - many without even realizing it.

Some end up on the safe side of the line, but others cross the line and cross ethical boundaries - and sometimes costly legal ones.

That line is the copyright line, deciding how teachers and students can respect people's intellectual property.

The bottom line is this: Copyright doesn't automatically mean, "This is mine. Don't you touch it!" Copyrighted material can be used in certain circumstances, and it's good to know a bit about the law before proceeding.

The silver lining is this: Copyright isn't the only license on digital media. There are other licenses that give you more freedoms to use that media - ethically and legally.

Kristina Peters, a digital learning specialist for the Nebraska Department of Education, recently discussed copyright, licensing and the essentials that teachers and students should know. See the whole interview in this YouTube (or in the embedded video below), and check out Kristina's slides on the topic here. (You can save them to your own Google Drive by clicking "File > Make a copy ...". You can download them as a PowerPoint file by clicking "File > Download as ... > PPTX".)

Here are some of the take-aways from that discussion:
1. Not all images can be used legally without getting permission:

A simple Google Images search will often return lots of copyrighted images that we don't have permission to use.

Those Google Images searches often display stock photos (professional photos that can used if you purchase a license). A white background is a good indicator that it might be a stock photo, Kristina said.

A watermark (a logo, letters, lines or anything else superimposed over an image) usually mean you don't currently have the rights to use that image. Removing a watermark from an image doesn't change that, Kristina said.

2. Downloading videos from YouTube is possible, but it's against YouTube's terms of service (see Section 5-B). Sometimes, teachers download videos because of spotty Internet connections or in fear of the video being removed. YouTube can take action, like shutting down your account - your YouTube account as well as other Google accounts (remember, YouTube is owned by Google!).

3. Uploading copyrighted material without permission can also get you in trouble with YouTube. Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (and maybe more because that stat is more than a year old). That doesn't mean your video will slip in "under the radar." YouTube automatically scans every uploaded video and compares it against a huge database of copyrighted material. Kristina and I have both had run-ins with YouTube regarding this:

Kristina is a singer, and she has received notices and video restrictions when she uploaded videos of herself singing with karaoke tracks playing in the background. (Singing a capella, however, did not trigger those notices for her.)

I uploaded a video I created about innovating in the classroom. Minutes after uploading it, YouTube took it down, put my account in bad standing and gave me a strike. (It has a three-strike system before taking action against your account.) It claimed there was inappropriate content in the video. (Go watch it yourself to see if there's anything inappropriate.) After an appeal, YouTube removed my strike, put my account in good standing and published my video.

4. Showing a full-length feature film in class is often a violation of the movie's copyright. Often teachers understand this and do it anyway (and Kristina and I both admitted to doing it too). We figure no one will ever know or care, but many companies do care and can find out. For example, Disney has an anti-piracy policy and encourages reporting of infringements by phone, email and physical mail. Someone who sees you (or hears of you) showing movies in class can report and, at times, can receive rewards as high as $10,000.

5. Just because you bought a song or album doesn't mean you can use it however you want. You need permission to put a full-length copyrighted song in a movie or slide show that you're going to display publicly. However, chunks of the song up to 30 seconds in length is acceptable by law. That's why you see dance groups do mash-ups of lots of songs for their routines - so they can use the songs they want legally without having to pay for licensing, Kristina said.

6. People load copyrighted media on Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers (among other sharing sites) without permission every day. Just because you find it one one of those sites (whether it's paid or free) doesn't mean you're licensed to use it, so proceed carefully. Kristina knows of curriculum teams that actively search these sites for district curriculum, looking for illegal use and publication of their district materials. Many creators (including lots and lots on Teachers Pay Teachers) make their own materials and have the license to use them, but some do not
7. If you're going to share on Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers or other sites, Kristina suggests some steps you can take to make sure you're sharing ethically and legally:

Create materials on your own time in your own home with your own devices.

Don't use any information identifying your district and/or your students.

Don't create materials from your school or district's curriculum or materials. If an idea is similar, that's probably OK as long as it doesn't take content from your school or district.

8. Violations of copyright can cost you a lot. Fines can cost $250 to $150,000, Kristina said, and if you're doing it wilfully, it can be accompanied by a year in prison. If that sounds like nothing more than a scare tactic, Kristina referenced two schools in her state that were fined - one for $200 and another for $3,000. An educational service unit in Nebraska published a presenter's materials to their site with her permission. However, the presenter had used copyrighted material without permission, and the educational service unit was held liable for publishing that image and had to pay a fine.

9. Copyrighted content can be used legally in certain circumstances. There are four key factors of "fair use", and the more of those you have in your favor, the stronger your case is against being held liable of copyright infringement:

The purpose and use of the copyrighted material - Was it transformative (i.e. did you change it to add your creative twist to it?)? Was it used for educational purposes? Was it a parody (i.e. a creative imitation derived from the copyrighted material)?

The amount used - Was it only as much as you needed for your purposes?

Fact or fiction - Proving copyright infringement is much harder for factual content.

Effect on the market - Is your work taking away profits from the copyright holder? (Kristina's example: teachers taking videos of themselves reading books to students. It sounds innocent, but a video like that goes against sales of and profit from the publisher's audio books.)

10. Creative Commons-licensed material can be used. In fact, when the author published it with that license, that's what he/she intended! Check the type of Creative Commons license your song/video/image/etc. bears before using it, because Creative Commons doesn't automatically give you freedom to do whatever you want. Creative Commons work may have any combination of these licenses:

Attribution: Give credit to the author.

Non-commercial: You can't profit from its use.

No derivatives: You can't change it (even changing a photo from color to black and white!)

Share alike: Whatever you do with it must also bear a Creative Commons share alike license.

11. Public domain media (images, videos, music, etc.) have less restrictions than Creative Commons. There are no rights on public domain works and you're free to use them. They become public domain, among other reasons, because their rights have expired, because they were created before copyright law existed, or because the author put them in the public domain.

12. There are LOTS of sources of and channels to find Creative Commons and public domain media. Here are some suggestions from Kristina and I:

13. Want to make sure you give credit correctly? Follow the TASL approach, Kristina says. Include:

Title of the work

Author of the work

Source of the work

Licence the work bears

14. Want to avoid copyright concerns with the media you use? Create it yourself! Take your own pictures. Create your own videos. Make your own music! You'll own all of the rights and won't have to worry about most of the stuff above.

Have other questions about copyright? Contact Kristina on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/mrskmpeters) or by email ( mrskmpeters@gmail.com).
For notifications of new Ditch That Textbook content and helpful links: Interested in having Matt present at your event or school? Contact him by e-mail! Matt is scheduled to present at the following upcoming events:

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14 copyright essentials teachers and students must know

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Students and teachers toe a very fuzzy ethical line every day - many without even realizing it. Some end up on the safe side of the line, but others cross the line and cross ethical boundaries - and sometimes costly legal ones. That line is the copyright line, deciding how teachers and students can respect people's intellectual property.

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Why we should be merging classrooms and how to do it! – Teaching Without a Quill

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Why we should be merging classrooms and how to do it! – Teaching Without a Quill

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Why we should be merging classrooms and how to do it!

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We as teachers are having students that are making AMAZING things. I have seen students create videos, websites, blogs, infographs, games, and SO much more. But there is still something missing with our classroom, our lesson plans, and we need to take it one step further.

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The @DavidGeurin Blog: 7 Reasons To Use Social Media In Your School (INFOGRAPHIC)

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The @DavidGeurin Blog: 7 Reasons To Use Social Media In Your School (INFOGRAPHIC)

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One thing is for sure, social media is here to stay. Never before have people been able to connect, share, and learn from one another as we do now. I can only imagine what might be next! As a result, our students need skills to win at life in a digital world. The ability to use social media to support life goals and possibilities can be a game-changer. I know it has been very powerful for me in my professional life. But one story is truly remarkable. I stumbled across
Marc Guberti on Twitter and was immediately interested to learn more about this young man. His bio describes him as an 18-year-old entrepreneur and social media expert. He now has over 290,000 Twitter followers and over 250,000 annual visits to his blog. No doubt he has created a powerful presence online. But he also shared this part of his mission:

"This isn't just about being successful and having financial flexibility. This is about creating a movement. I want to prove to other teens that it is possible to become successful at a young age. In a world where teens are increasingly going to drugs and drinking as a way to make themselves feel good and student debt keeps on rising, there are resources available that can allow any person of any age to become a leader and create a tribe of people that matter."

While every student may not want to build a social media empire like Marc, everyone wants to be part of a tribe of people that matter. And as educators, we want every student to have the opportunity to reach the maximum of their potential. In today's world, the ability to connect productively with others through social media can increase opportunities for college admissions, job opportunities, entrepreneurship ideas, and more. So here are There is so much to know to be a safe, responsible user of social media. We must teach digital citizenship. When we regularly use social media in the classroom, it provides more opportunities for learning about safe and responsible use.Social media continues to grow and is now an excellent way to learn, build a professional network, and even get a job. Our students will be better prepared for future opportunities if they have experiences with social media that are for learning and professional reasons.
I believe helping students use social media effectively starts with educators and schools modeling the use of social media and inviting students to use social media as part of their education. When students see ways social media can be used for learning and professionally, that is a powerful message. We should also model and discuss the safe and appropriate use of social media to help our students avoid situations that could be damaging to themselves or others.

7 Reasons To Use Social Media In Your School. Feel free to download the infographic below to print or share as you wish. I hope this information helps your school or team.
1. Engage Parents and Community

Social media is a great way to connect with parents and community. Every classroom and school has a story to tell. Social media allows educators the opportunity to make visible the great things that are happening.

6. Promote Positive Messages

There are so many negatives on social media. That's one reason some educators have been reluctant to engage. However, schools have an opportunity to lead to create a positive presence and help students create a positive presence. Make the positives so loud it drowns out the negative aspects of social media.

7. Connect with Experts 4. Make Global Connections

Give students a sense of learning beyond classroom walls. Social media allows connections across the globe, perhaps with another classroom. These connections help students to see different perspectives and cultures.

5. Prepare Kids for the Future

2. Share Student Work

Sharing student work on social media instantly creates an authentic audience. It's possible to share examples of digital products, projects, artwork, writing, and just about anything else.

3. Teach Digital Citizenship

We don't have to be dependent on textbooks anymore for information. It's possible to connect with experts in every discipline. Classrooms are interacting with authors, scientists, astronauts, activists, and entrepreneurs. These connections are inspiring and authentic.

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7 Reasons To Use Social Media In Your School (INFOGRAPHIC)

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One thing is for sure, social media is here to stay. Never before have people been able to connect, share, and learn from one another as we do now. I can only imagine what might be next! As a result, our students need skills to win at life in a digital world.

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ISTE | 3 lessons that drive home digital citizenship

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ISTE | 3 lessons that drive home digital citizenship

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When educators talk to students about digital citizenship, they often come from the standpoint of protection. The discussion centers on how to stay safe and protect their online identities.

But it's time to move digital citizenship to the activism stage. "This is the idea that we can use digital tools to improve the world around us to support causes, empower others or create better environments," explains Alec Couros, professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada.

But how do we get students to lead and become empowered digital citizens? It all starts with a shift in mindset.

"We have to move beyond the cybersafety initiatives that started in the 1990s. It's no longer about scaring kids off the web," Couros says. "We need to think more about how we can help kids use their online identity to grow and shape the world around them. It's about bettering our world, not just about safety."

Getting there requires buy-in from all stakeholders - teachers, administrators, staff and students. That's why Couros encourages these groups to learn together. He's seen this in action at the day-long online symposium he created for 9,000 students and teachers across Saskatchewan.

The symposium provided teachers with basic content and curricular support, and allowed students to connect with peers, learn from online scenarios, and eventually create social activism campaigns and codes of conduct.

Here are three activities Couros uses to drive home the importance of digital citizenship.

1. Cybersleuthing

This activity works well with students in the middle grades and higher. Students are assigned to "cybersleuth" a well-known person who has an online identity. Students search for information on the web and then analyze how the details they share about themselves shape their image. Older students can choose to sleuth each other, while teachers might search for a well-known figure in education to see what kind of sharing they might want to be doing online.

Impact: By asking students to reflect on the way we use bits of online information to generate an opinion of another person, teachers can help students recognize what their own digital footprints say about them.

2. Digital detectives

In this activity, students must determine whether particular websites or other sources of online information are accurate. Students act as detectives to identify the signs of a reliable (or unreliable) online resource to construct their "detective kit" of digital literacy skills that will help them to be critical online readers. This exercise can be adapted for various grade levels.

Impact: Misinformation spreads rapidly on the web, and the ability to find and identify accurate information online is a necessary digital age skill. This exercise allows students to use real-life examples to practice being critical readers.

3. Social activism projects

This multi-part workshop (co-developed with Couros' colleague Katia Hildebrandt) takes students through the process of developing an online social activism project. Students identify social issues in their communities, evaluate examples of social action campaigns to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and develop their social action project's timeline, platform and other information.

Impact: There are many examples of successful student-led social action campaigns and this activity helps students develop their own. The overall impact of such campaigns can be hard to gauge, but the use of social media allows students an authentic audience and increases engagement with young audiences.
During his ISTE 2016 session Developing Student Upstanders: Empowering Youth as Leaders of Digital Citizenship Initiatives, Alec Couros shared a variety of ways to drive home digital citizenship. Want to be notified of great learning opportunities like this one?

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3 lessons that drive home digital citizenship

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When educators talk to students about digital citizenship, they often come from the standpoint of protection. The discussion centers on how to stay safe and protect their online identities. But it's time to move digital citizenship to the activism stage.

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Personal and Professional vs. Public and Private – The Principal of Change

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Personal and Professional vs. Public and Private – The Principal of Change

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Hi Kids!

Meet Faux Paw, an adventurous six-toed, Web-surfing cat that loves having fun with her friends. Sometimes, she runs into trouble while being on her computer and while playing video games. Certainly, she's learned one thing over the years: the internet is like a big city, with a lots of possibilities! That means it is important to learn how to use it safely and follow the rules. Read or watch Faux Paw's adventures by clicking on the links below:

Faux Paw's Dangerous Download

In this new adventure, the Web-surfing Techno Cat learns that downloading is a great way to get information . . . if it's done the right way. When using a risky file sharing program to get a new song, Faux Paw learns the hard way that illegal downloading hurts everyone, including herself!

Downloads

Faux Paw Goes to the Games:
Balancing Real Life with Screen Time

Have you ever gotten your real life mixed up with your online life? Faud Paw did, and wow, did it cause a problem! After she got invited to light the flame at the Great Animal Olympics, she got distracted playing WcW-Worlds of CatWars-online. Read this story to find out if she was able to make it to the opening ceremonies in time to light the Olympic Cauldron.

Downloads

Faux Paw Meets the First Lady: How to Handle Cyberbullying

Do you know what you should do if someone says something mean or untrue about you online? What about if it happens to one of your friends? Learn what Faux Paw finds out when she meets former First Lady Laura Bush.

Downloads

Faux Paw Adventures in the Internet

The internet is like a big city with great places to go, but you have to be careful! Faux Paw found this out first hand. She had a REAL adventure on the internet, and it wasn't the fun kind. When you read what almost happened, you'll see why it's so important to follow the rules for online safety!

Downloads

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Meet Faux Paw, an adventurous six-toed, Web-surfing cat that loves having fun with her friends. Sometimes, she runs into trouble while being on her computer and while playing video games. Certainly, she's learned one thing over the years: the internet is like a big city, with a lots of possibilities!

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Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites
The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents.
Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.

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Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents. Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.

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The Digizen website has now closed and all relevant content and new resources are hosted here on the Childnet website.

Created in 2005, the Digizen website provided information for educators, parents, carers, and young people.

It was used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourage users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS.

Amongst the ground-breaking and popular resources hosted by the Digizen website was the award-winning film Let's Fight It Together, which shows ways in which cyberbullying can occur, who it involves, how it can affect different people, and what can be done to prevent it and respond to it.

Other resources, including the Digizen Game, has now been retired. Please see below for up-to-date resources from the Childnet Team.
Take a look at some of Childnet's other ground-breaking resources and projects from the past 25 years.

Donate

Even a small donation can support the development of our online safety resources and help our Education Team to connect with more children and young people.
Donate

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The Digizen website has now closed and all relevant content and new resources are hosted here on the Childnet website. Created in 2005, the Digizen website provided information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It was used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourage users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS.

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Teaching Key Digital Citizenship Concepts to Children | InCtrl

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InCtrl is an online resource that teaches key digital citizenship lessons to students in grades four to eight. Start your digital journey with us today.

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Scope & Sequence: Common Sense K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Media

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Scope & Sequence: Common Sense K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Media

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Interactive lessons and activities for all students!

Use digital citizenship lesson plans to address timely topics and prepare students to take ownership of their digital lives. Browse lessons by grade and topic below, or see an overview of the curriculum.

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Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Education

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Use digital citizenship lesson plans to address timely topics and prepare students to take ownership of their digital lives. Browse lessons by grade and topic below, or see an overview of the curriculum.

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educational-origami - Digital Citizen AUA

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educational-origami - Digital Citizen AUA

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Acceptable Use Agreement

Introduction

As a frequent presenter and speaker on digital citizenship, I feel it is critical to presented a balanced and considered perspective.

Its easy, particularly when presented with a captive audience, to place undue emphasis on the darker side of out digital lives. The media abounds with horror stories and tragedies, of mis-adventure and mis-direction, crime and punishment, but this is what sells papers and magazines and attracts readers/viewers. Seldom do you see the predominant reality of our digital world, people getting on with their day to day activities, be these business or leisure.

Standing up and preaching about the dangers and risks is easy, often captivating and grabs attention. Its simple to find the latest disasters and use these to highlight the pitfalls and traps that are present. Shock and awe does make for a good presentation, but to focus on the negative or exaggerate the risks is to lose the opportunity for learning. You don't want to see teachers, parents or others in a fit of fervor banning all technology use because of perceived risks and dangers.

Its critical that we provide a balanced perspective and provide mechanisms and processes that provide guidance and support. Short term solutions like blocking, banning etc are ignoring the underlying issues of digital citizenship. While they will stop or limit the incidence or occurrence of either inappropriate action or damage, they do little to prepare people for a world beyond the walled garden we have created.

It is only by changing behaviours and understanding, that real change can be made. It is only by changing these that we can make a sustained, hopefully life long, difference.

Too many people have fallen in to the trap of setting rules in an attempt to provide a safe environment. Definitive statements have a very limited life expectancy, they are often out of date before they are written. The rapid evolution of the web, of social media and technology means that statements specify medium or technologies are soon obsolete.

However, behaviors and actions are timeless. Change and adapt these and you provide a safe foundation for activity, learning and recreation in a dynamic world.

The following are a series of age specific acceptable use agreements and guidelines. They are intended to to establish a suitable moral and ethical approach to the use of technology in its various forms.

I have combined the three different levels of acceptable use agreements into on summary document that links the three strands of responsibility into a digital citizenship continuum. The three strands are:

Personal responsibility

Social responsibility

Material responsibility

Senior School AUA

This Acceptable Use Agreement has six conditions or facets of being a Digital Citizen. The intended audience of this agreement is for Senior School students

1. I will show respect for myself through my actions.Respect Yourself.
I will select online names that are appropriate,
I will consider the information and images that I post online.
I will consider what personal information about my life, experiences, experimentation or relationships I post.
I will not be obscene.

2. I will ensure that the information, images and materials I post online will not put me at risk.Protect Yourself.
I will not publish my personal details, contact details or a schedule of my activities.
I will report any attacks or inappropriate behavior directed at me and I will seek support from appropriate people or organizations.
I will protect passwords, accounts and resources.

3. I will show respect to others.Respect Others.
I will not use electronic mediums to flame, bully, harass or stalk other people.
I will show respect for other people in my choice of websites,
I will not visit sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate.
I will not abuse my rights of access and I will not enter other people's private spaces or areas.

4. I will protect others by reporting abuse, not forwarding inappropriate materials or communications; and not visiting sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate.Protect Others.
I will moderate unacceptable materials and conversations, reporting conversations that are inappropriate or unacceptable.

5. I will request permission to use resources.Respect Intellectual property.
I will suitably cite any and all use of websites, books, media etc.
I will acknowledge all primary and secondary sources.
I will validate information.
I will use and abide by the fair use rules.

6. I will request to use the software and media others produce.Protect Intellectual Property.
I will use free and open source alternatives rather than pirating software.
I will purchase, license and register all software.
I will purchase my music and media, and refrain from distributing these in a manner that violates their licenses.
I will report vandalism and damage
I will act with integrity.

By signing this agreement, I undertake to always act in a manner that is respectful to myself and others, to act appropriately in a moral and ethical manner.
I, agree to follow the principles of digital citizenship outlined in this agreement and accept that failing to follow these tenets will have consequences.

Downloadable format: -

Middle School AUA

This is a Digital Citizenship agreement for Middle School Students. The langauge is soften to be more age appropriate and the 6 facets detailed above are simplified into three.

A good citizen is someone who upholds and respects the laws of their country, but also acts in an appropriate way. Good citizens respect moral and ethical guidelines and behaviours. They show care and concern for themselves, their neighbours and other members of their communities. The good citizen respects other peoples property, and expects others to do the same for them.
The good digital citizen applies the same rules to the cyber-world. A digital citizen is a person who obeys the legal rules about using digital technologies, and acts with respect and care for themselves, others and property. And in return, they expect the same respect to be shown to them.
There are three key parts to digital citizenship. They are looking after yourself, other people and property.

1. Looking after yourself by:

Choosing online names that are suitable and respectful.

Only inviting people you actually know in the real world to be your friends in the online world.

Only visiting sites that are appropriate and respecting the rules that websites have about age. Some sites are only for adults. If you wouldn't feel comfortable showing the website to you parents or grandparents then its inappropriate.

Setting your privacy settings so that only the people you know can see you and your personal information.

Using passwords that are hard to guess and keep these secret.

Only putting information online that is appropriate and posting pictures that are suitable. Not everyone seeing your profile or pictures will be friendly.

Always reporting anything that happens online which makes you feel uncomfortable or unhappy.

Talking to trusted adults, like your parents and teachers, about your online experiences. This includes both the good and the bad experiences.

2. Looking after others:

By show you care by not flaming (sending hurtful or inflammatory messages) other people, or forwarding messages that are unkind or inappropriate.

By not getting involved in conversations that are unkind, mean or bullying.

By reporting any conversations you see that are unkind, mean or bullying. Imagine if the things being written were about you. If you would find them offensive then they are inappropriate.

Some websites are disrespectful because they show people behaving inappropriately or illegally - or are racist, bigoted or unkind. Show your respect for others by avoiding these sites. If you visit one by accident, close it and tell your teacher or an adult.

Show respect for other's privacy by not trying to get into their online spaces without invitation, by not stalking them or copying their pictures.

3. Looking after property:

By not stealing other people's property. It's easy to download music, games and movies, but piracy (downloading media that you have not bought) is just the name given to stealing online.

By not sharing the music, movies, games and other software that you own with other people.

By checking that the information you are using is correct. Anyone can say anything on the web, so you need to check that the research is correct by using reliable sites. When in doubt ask your teacher or your parents.

By looking after other people's websites, acting appropriately when visiting them, not making changes or vandalising them, and reporting any damage that you finds.

By signing this agreement, I undertake to always act in a manner that is respectful to myself and others, to act appropriately in a moral and ethical manner.

I, agree to follow the principles of digital citizenship outlined in this agreement and accept that failing to follow these tenets will have consequences.
Downloadable format:

Junior School Guidelines

This is a simplified version to suit the younger audience. In order to keep it readable and usable I have reduced it down to the minimum size and complexity of terminology . I have run this set of guidelines through the Lexile readability analyser and SMOG tools.
SMOG = 12.4
Lexile = 710L
This is a set of guidelines rather than an agreement, as having the students sign an agreement is pretty much meaningless. It is intended to be used regularly to reinforce appropriate behaviours and actions.
Need more information on readability tests?
Have a look at wikipedia's entries on them - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexile and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMOG

Digital Citizenship Guidelines
Junior School
Looking after me.

I will only go on the computer when I have permission.

I will only go to pages I am allowed to go to.

I will only share pictures and stories about myself when my teacher tells me to.

I will talk to my parents and teacher about all of my online friends.

I will tell my teacher or parents if anyone is unkind to me on the computer.

Looking after others.

I will only say nice things about people.

I will ask before I share a picture or story about a person.

I will only go to places that are nice and I will tell my parents or teacher if I go to a place that is nasty, unkind or rude.

Looking after stuff.

I will not download movies, games or music.

I will check that the information I get on the web is correct.

I wont leave rude or unkind messages on other people spaces.

These guidelines are an agreement between the school and the students about creating and maintaining students websites hosted by or supported by the school. These guidelines looks at the six tenants of the digital citizenship: respecting and protecting yourself, other people and intellectual property.

This agreement covers the use of web publishing through homepages, calendars, blogs and blog comments, social networks sites, wikis, podcasting & vodcasting, chatrooms and sharing files.

It is expected that you will always act in an ethical and moral manner.
.

Basis principles

I will use the facilities for the purpose they were intended, my posts, comments and content will have an educational focus.

I will respect and protect myself and others by ensuring that the content I add to my website shows me, my peers, the school and the wider community in the best light and perspective.

I will not endanger myself or my peers by posting material that could put me or them at risk.

I will moderate all comments posted on my blog. I will remove comments that are inappropriate or could cause offence to other people

I will ensure that the material I upload does not violate anyone's intellectual property and I will acknowledge the source of my materials.

I will, in all matters, conduct myself as a young adult acting in a moral and ethical manner.

I will always report abuse or inappropriate behaviour to safe guard my safety and the safety of my peers and community.

I understand that all material published is not private and is subject to view by a wide range of people including members of the school as well as the wider community.

I, agree to follow the principles of digital citizenship outlined in this agreement and accept that failing to follow these will have consequences.
Downloadable format:

This is an attempt to expand on the six facets of teh Digital citizenship Acceptable use and highlight what is meant by each aspect. It is an attempt to provide further guidance.

Respecting and Protecting yourself by:

1. looking after your hardware appropriately, carrying your laptop or mobile device in a bag, securing it in a safe place and keeping it charged
2. saving my work regularly
3. backing up important data regularly (recommended minimum is weekly)
4. scanning your computer for viruses regularly, update the virus definitions regularly.
5. applying patches and updates to your operating systems and software
6. selecting suitable online names, that I can use in professional communications
7. selecting strong passwords and changing these regualrly. Recommendations are:

8 characters or more

Number and letters

Special characters

Upper and lower case

8. protecting your passwords, don't share these with anyone. Locking your computer
9. managing your files
10. Using descriptive file names
11. creating and organising into folders
12. considering what personal information is made public. This can be on your social networking site, when you sign up to services or register software.
13. only put required information in online profiles.
14. considering who you allow to be your friends online.
15. building positive relationships online, keeping these open and transparent. Being cautious in who we share information with and who we meet.
16. posting only material that portrays you in a positive light.
17. consider which images of yourself you publish
18. keep email addresses and personal details private
19. considering carefully when and where I use my credit card details etc
20. remembering anything you say online is public and usually permanent
21. reporting any attacks or inappropriate behaviour directed at you
22. acting with integrity and respect.
Respecting and Protecting others by:

1. reporting abuse to appropriate authorities when I see it.
2. not flaming or abusing people
3. not forwarding junk mail, spam or inappropriate materials
4. not visiting sites that are degrading or inappropriate
5. not entering private spaces or change other people pages
6. informing people appropriately when they have left open their profile etc
7. not using anyone else accounts, log ons etc.
8. asking permission before I publish images ot content that may contain details about other people.
9. respecting other people's rights to privacy and anonymity
10. respecting the trust others have in me by protecting other people email, IM and skype addresses and contact details.
11. protecting other on my network by having a protected, updated and antivirus checked computer.
12. always acting with integrity and respect.

Respecting and Protecting Intellectual Property by:

1. having an understanding of the rules and laws applying to:

copyright

intellectual property

Fair use

creative commons

2. asking permission before I use materials and respect the owners decision regarding this material.
3. only using software and media that I have permission to use. This can be material made available under creative commons or the public domain, material I have purchased etc.
4. not sharing my media or software with others unless the license allows me to do this.
5. using free and open source alternative software and medias instead of pirating licensed or copy written ones.
6. registering my software and alway considering what information I need to provide the company. I will read the options and make sure that I understand that my information and details may be distributed and sold.
7. validating all information sources
8. citing my information sources using a suitable bibliography method.
9. giving credit to and acknowledge people and sources that have influenced my thinking or products.
10. Acting with integrity and respect
This AUA is produced under the share and share alike creative commons licience. Please feel free to use this agreement if it suits your purposes and needs.

I would like to acknowledge the suggestions and input from the many people who contributed to the original blog post outlining these Acceptable Use Agreements for the digital citizen. These include:

Keith Patterson

Hiedi Gable

Stephen Ransom

Kevin McLaughlin

Ian Jukes

Lee Crockett

Adam Heath

Brendon Kelly

Doug De Kock

James MCConville

David Sands

Brian Kuhn

Frances Bell

Clint H

Alec Couros

Stuart Ridout

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Acceptable Use Agreement As a frequent presenter and speaker on digital citizenship, I feel it is critical to presented a balanced and considered perspective. Its easy, particularly when presented with a captive audience, to place undue emphasis on the darker side of out digital lives.

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1-to-1 Essentials - Acceptable Use Policies | Common Sense Media

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1-to-1 Essentials - Acceptable Use Policies | Common Sense Media

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Common Sense Education | Digital Citizenship Curriculum & EdTech Reviews

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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Digital Citizenship: Share Spam with Students - Teacher Tech

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Digital Citizenship: Share Spam with Students - Teacher Tech

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When possible, it is important that we educate our students on how to be safe on the web. Scammers are always out there trying to take your personal information and money. When you receive spam/scam email that does not have inappropriate information try asking students to determine if this is a valid email and why or why not. Students can practice critical thinking skills and gain valuable knowledge to keep themselves safe in the future.

Check the email address.

Is it from the expected company?

Is it spelled correctly?

Are there extra words along with the company name in the email address?
A spammer is unable to purchase visa.com but could purchase visasalesforce.com possibly.

Never click on links!

Hover over the link to see where the destination URL goes. Most likely it is not visa.com. Even if it looks like it is going to where you think it should go, do not click on the link.

Go directly to the website yourself. Type in the web address for Visa, PayPal or whatever website you think is contacting you.

Are images and logos present?

Lack of images and logos is a surefire sign of spam.

The presence of images and logos does not indicate that the email is valid. It is incredibly easy to download images off of the web or to modify a legitimate email and send it out.

Be extra vigilant when the email looks legitimate.

Does the email include your name and some account information that only the company would know?

"Dear Visa Customer" screams scam. Visa knows your name.

Visa will include the last 4 digits of your card number in an email.
Even then, scrutinize carefully the email.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2016

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Digital Citizenship: Share Spam with Students - Teacher Tech

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When possible, it is important that we educate our students on how to be safe on the web. Scammers are always out there trying to take your personal information and money. When you receive spam/scam email that does not have inappropriate information try asking students to determine if this is a valid email and why ...

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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A place where you can discover the unlimited potential of your Ed Tech learning.

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The Indiana Department of Education celebrates Indiana Digital Citizenship Week the first full week of September following Labor Day. The celebration is part of an ongoing effort to teach students how to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world.

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Why I am Renouncing my Digital Citizenship – INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION

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Why I am Renouncing my Digital Citizenship – INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION

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It is over. I am done. I want to in no way support the idea that we "need to raise digital citizens." In fact I officially renounced my digital citizenship. I just need to go to the embassy and fill out the requisite forms.

Is it at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google+? Maybe I need to visit AOL Online. Nope. Its probably located at Prodigy. After all that was the first place I started to interact with folks in online spaces. Yet I can't go there at all, let alone go to renounce my digital citizenship either. Why?

Because the idea of digital citizenship is an empty and hollow construct. It has done as much damage to the integration of digital text and tools as the idea of Digital immigrants/natives.

I have had this thought for quite some time. Yet it really gelled in last night's #edtechchat.

I personally have renounced my digital citizenship. Term used more for fear mongering than instruction. #edtechchat

- Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) September 17, 2013

I personally have renounced my digital citizenship. Term used more for fear mongering than instruction. #edtechchat

- Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) September 17, 2013

@ugafrank @jgmac1106 Yes, we should treat e/o w/dignity online & offline, but there IS online-specific etiquette to be learned. #edtechchat

- Lyn Hilt (@lynhilt) September 17, 2013

@lynhilt @ugafrank But shouldnt be first focus of instruction. #SM should first be used to enhance existing pedagogical goals. #edtechchat

- Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) September 17, 2013

My brief Uneducated History of Digital Citizenship
Digital Citizenship has long been the darling of the #edtech community. In fact they are enshrined in the ITSE standards:

5. Digital Citizenship
Students understand human, cultural, and societal
issues related to technology and practice legal and
ethical behavior.
a. Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible
use of information and technology
b. Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology
that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity
c. Demonstrate personal responsibility for
lifelong learning
d. Exhibit leadership for digital citizenship

ISTE will even give a seal of approval to educational materials that help to build digital citizenship.

I do not know when the term became en vogue, but the idea of digital citizenship seems enculrturalted in computer classrooms especially at the elemenrary level.
A Product of Fear
I believe the idea of digital citizenship was born out of fear. Fear of content producers who wanted to control the channels of production and distribution. In the heyday of Napster they wanted to codify the idea that stealing was wrong. If only we knew this before the Internet. If only someone put this in their learning standards eons ago (oh yeah they did...see the 8th commandment.)

Digital Citizenship was born for a fear of child safety. As soon as the World Wide Web was born every parent feared that Chris Hansen of Dateline needed to be on the other end of a dial-up connection. There are truly awful people in this world and children need to be protected. That doesn't mean, however, fear should drive our technology curriculum.
A false dichotomy
I also believe digital citizenship creates a false dichotomy between our offline and online spaces. Am I truly to believe that someone of high moral character will act in ill-refute once they log on to Facebook? Is a troubled student posting bullying messages online a picture right out of Norman Rockwell when they head to Sunday School? No, that is ridiculous.

Being a good person should be your goal both online and and unplugged. When we push digital citeznship too far we get too much government oversight. That is, in fact what citizen means. Citizen means the "inhabitant of a city." And with the suffix "ship" citizenship is defined as "status, rights, privileges, and responsibilities of a citizen".Thus citeznship requires government and since "digital citizenship" was born of fear it leads to an overprotected government such as school districts that spy on their citizens. After all we need to protect our citizens.
If not Digital Citizens then What?
I have long advocated the building of digital footprints. In fact I write about here on my blog.

I do believe we need our students to create an online identity by building an online space or digital hub

I also believe what you do online has real life consequences. Just check out this infogrpahic from Mashable:

Clearly recruiters consider your curated identity (I am done in for by the grammatical mistakes). So there are implications to what we do online.
Connected Learning rather than Digital Citizen
I prefer the construct of connected learning. I have been involved with the community around Connected Learning for a little over a year. The group is constantly pushing my thinking forward. It revolves not around fear but engagement. Not around protecting content producers but encouraging content creation. Connected Learning isn't about a silo of safety but rather a tool of peer engagement.

So I am no longer a digital citizen. Instead I am a connected learner. I hope to reach new understandings in both online and offline spaces through: interest powered, peer supported, and academically oriented learning spaces.

Images:

The image is a remix:

Passport By Rich Bowen (originally posted to Flickr as Passport) [CC-BY-2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Digital Revolution By Marfia Adlina (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

[relatedkingpro]

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Why I am Renouncing my Digital Citizenship

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It is over. I am done. I want to in no way support the idea that we "need to raise digital citizens." In fact I officially renounced my digital citizenship. I just need to go to the embassy and fill out the requisite forms. Is it at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google+?

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Narrow Your News Search to Expand Your News Knowledge – Early/Lately

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Narrow Your News Search to Expand Your News Knowledge – Early/Lately

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Narrow Your News Search to Expand Your News Knowledge

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I've been working with a US History teacher connecting Gilded Age topics to current issues still present in the United State (race relations, Native American rights, industrialization, etc). While being a good way to connect the present with the past, it also provides an opportunity to bring in current events and teach news literacy.

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources - EasyBib Blog

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources - EasyBib Blog

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We recently posted, " 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article," which highlighted key items to look for on a website when determining its credibility. The infographic found here summarizes the content from the blog post and students can use it as a guide when using news sources in research. Post, print, or share it with your students or others!

Looking for other resources related to website credibility? We've listed some of our favorites below the infographic!

This lesson plan, by Channel One News (a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company), includes discussion questions, a writing activity, and a video that can be shown to students to help them understand that they shouldn't believe everything that they read or hear. It highlights fake information posted on social media sites and also discusses how "official" looking news sites could actually be fake.

This checklist can be distributed to students to help them determine if a news article is fake or not. We love how they included red flags throughout the checklist. Too many red flags circled? This means that the website the student is rating most likely contains false information!

Have you seen our blog post, "How Savvy Are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills." ?

The websites listed on this blog post all contain incorrect information. See if your students are able to put the pointers from the infographic to the test and catch on that these sites are not credible.

This page includes the TED-Ed videos, How to Choose Your News , and How False News Can Spread . It also features discussion questions for students to answer, as well as an activity where students are asked to impose a 48-hour news blackout.
Related blog posts:

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources - EasyBib Blog

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We recently posted, " 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article," which highlighted key items to look for on a website when determining its credibility. The infographic found here summarizes the content from the blog post and students can use it as a guide when using news sources in research.

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Teacher created website to teach about Fake News and other media literacy topics. A+ resource. by https://twitter.com/ScottPadway

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Critical thinking skills truly matter in learning. Why? Because they are life skills we use every day of our lives. Everything from our work to our recreational pursuits, and all that's in between, employs these unique and valuable abilities. Consciously developing them takes thought-provoking discussion and equally thought-provoking questions to get it going. Begin right here with the Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet.

It's a simple infographic offering questions that work to develop critical thinking on any given topic. Whenever your students discover or talk about new information, encourage them to use these questions for sparking debate and the sharing of opinions and insights among each other. Together they can work at building critical thinking skills in a collaborative and supportive atmosphere.

How Does It Work?

Critical thinking is thinking on purpose. It's clear, rational, logical, and independent thinking. It's about practicing mindful communication and problem-solving with freedom from bias or egocentric tendency. You can apply critical thinking to any kind of subject, problem, or situation you choose. We made the Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet for you with this in mind.

The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet includes categories for Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Each section has eight questions that begin with their corresponding word. The questions are meant to be versatile and broad, and applicable to a range of topics.

In these questions you'll find great potential conversation starters and fillers. That said, this is obviously not a definitive list! Let them inspire your students to come up with their own questions for critical thinking skill building.

Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet for Printing

You can grab an 11x17 PDF file of the Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet for quick and easy printing. Download an 11x17 colour PDF of the infographic right here.

We really hope you enjoy this cheatsheet. Use it to help your students build solid critical thinking habits and skills.

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The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic]

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Critical thinking skills truly matter in learning. Why? Because they are life skills we use every day of our lives. Everything from our work to our recreational pursuits, and all that's in between, employs these unique and valuable abilities. Consciously developing them takes thought-provoking discussion and equally thought-provoking questions to get it going.

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12 Students Speak Out About Digital Citizenship | Burlington High School Help Desk

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12 Students Speak Out About Digital Citizenship | Burlington High School Help Desk

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Editor's Note: Recently, Dr. Marialice Curran shared the article "8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully" via Twitter along with a challenge to schools nationwide to provide a rebuttal. I decided to take Marialice up on this challenge. I assigned the Help Desk students of Burlington High School to read the article and write a response highlighting the positive ways students are using social media. Below is what each student had to say. You can click on the students' names to visit their individual blogs.
Timmy Sullivan
After reading the blog post, 8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully, I remain perplexed as to why the conversation revolving around social media and its implications on the lives of teens remains a negative one. While the author's citations of past incidents may be true, they provide no service whatsoever to counteracting cyber bullying, however, only perpetuate negative stereotypes surrounding the world of social media. Rather than provide a solution or effect positive change to the cited malicious behavior, the author participates in the culture of shaming social media: an action that only makes the internet space less safe for teens.

As I explain in my (Spanish) EdCamp Global Classroom Presentation, "Buscame por Google, Se Reto" (Google Me, I Dare You), degrading social media promotes negative use. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as the self-fulfilling prophecy- if you have a negative attitude, negativity will occur. Similarly, by constantly lecturing students, parents, and teachers about the harms of social platforms, students develop negative schemas for social media and learn to associate its use with malicious behavior. Therefore, I dare to ask: why is the conversation never positive?

Well, that is quickly changing by thought-leaders eagerly following the footsteps of Dr. Marialice Curran. I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Curran virtually several times, simultaneously creating a positive digital footprint as well as demonstrating 21st century interview skills as I hosted her on the Burlington High School's live Google Hangout webinar, Help Desk Live. The only times I have met Dr. Curran face-to-face were at the nation's first Digital Citizenship Summit, and again when she invited me to present at the first international Digital Citizenship Summit in England. In fact, the sole reason Dr. Curran and I met was because of my positive use of social media. After following my work avidly on Twitter and About.me, Dr. Curran was eager to speak with me and include student voice in her work with the DigCitSummits. As a direct result of leveraging social media to my professional advantage, through serving as a contributing author to the BHS Help Desk blog, Teachers With Apps, and my own blog, I have gained a digital reach of over 200,000 viewers in over 160 countries across 6 continents (82% of the globe), as well as been invited to speak in 4 countries across 3 continents, interning in digital content for EdTechTeacher, and even blogging for brands as renowned as Rosetta Stone.

Clearly my experience leveraging social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, my blog) is taboo. But- dare I question the status quo again- why does it have to be? If we collectively divorce from the rhetoric of social media's explicitly harmful nature, then we embrace the challenge to promote positive social media use in schools. Students can learn to leverage Twitter to build a global community of learners, use YouTube to share their content, connect with professionals via LinkedIn, and assert their voice through blogging. Through education, demonstration, and proactive conversation we can abolish cyber bullying- but we must first abolish our negative mentality.
Caroline Akerley
While the general attitude on social media in the high school setting is typically a negative one, plagued by claims that sites such as Twitter are breeding grounds for inappropriate use and bullying, Burlington High School exhibits a much different attitude. Simply writing off the legitimate uses of social media based on archaic beliefs that it is harmful to students just will not do anymore as schools, such as Burlington, are utilizing the many benefits of social networking. The interactions between teachers, students, and administrators on various social media sites create a safe and productive online community. These interactions, which occur inside and outside of school, connect members of the school community in an effective and mutually beneficial way.

Hashtags are a popular way for Twitter users to connect and express their opinions on world trends. At Burlington High School, various teachers and administrators use hashtags to connect with students after class. The most commonly used one is " ," which students use to connect with other students and administrators. Although one of its main uses is to update students on snow days or delays, it is also used by our principal, Mr. Sullivan , to send out important updates and news. March 23rd was "#WorldPoetryDay," and many of the English teachers took this opportunity to create Twitter-based assignments regarding poetry appreciation. Mrs. Janovitz , my senior English teacher, asked that our class tweet our favorite line from any poem and feature the hashtag. She favorited and replied to many of the tweets that were sent out. Teachers like Mrs. Allison involve the students in fun and engaging projects on Twitter. Her class passes around a stuffed elephant which they received for symbolically adopted and posts funny pictures of it using the hashtag "#50picsfor136."

Having teachers and administrators with a strong online presence encourages students to be conscious of what they are posting. There are very few incidents of social media misuse at our school as a direct result of the involvement of adults in the school community. Several of my teachers and sports captains follow me on Twitter, and I interact with them regularly. Ms. Scheffer sends Twitter direct messages to me about assignments, and has even tweeted me wishing me luck in my upcoming hockey game. When my calculus teacher, , could not reach me by email, she tweeted to me so that I would not miss her message. Not only does having teachers present deter me and many other students from misusing Twitter, but many varsity sports teams and extracurricular activities have Twitter pages. From hockey, to National Honor Society, to Rotary Interact club pages, I am connected with many influential teachers and coaches, who as a result, have full access to my account.

It is evident to anyone who spends a day at Burlington High School that Twitter is an important educational tool and means of communication for the community. So why is it that more people are writing and paying attention to articles such as "8 Ways Kids are Using Instagram to Bully" than those that promote the many benefits of involving students and teachers in social media? The issues detailed in this article are not even present at BHS because of the presence of teachers, administrators, and coaches on various social media. Students are aware of how important it is to maintain a positive digital presence, as it can be accessed easily by many members of the BHS community. The involvement of teachers and students on social media does not inhibit learning or encourage bullying, but rather allows academic interaction outside of the classroom and discourages inappropriate behavior.
Josh Boulos
Twitter is one of the most powerful social media tools in the world. According to the company's fact sheet, there are 320 million monthly active users on Twitter . But how many of them are used in a positive way? Check out my twitter handle HERE to see how I use Twitter in a positive way. When checking out my Twitter account please realize how professional my account really is! In the last year I have turned my social media status around completely. I realized how important it is to my digital profile and that it could effect my future! I have participated in multiple "#techteamMA" Twitter chats that are a great example on how to use Twitter in a positve way. Please view the pictures that I have provided that show clear cut examples on how much potential Twitter has to be used in a positive way!

I am not the only one that uses Twitter the correct way. Click HERE to visit Peace First Prize, a website that consists of many success stories on how using social media in a positive way influenced their lives tremendously. This website consists of many celebrity ambassadors that support using social media accounts in the most positive way possible. It's crazy how we don't hear about this stuff on the main stream news!

, states that bullies are the most active on Instagram. In comparison to Twitter, I think that bullies are more likely to attack over Twitter. Twitter provides a better platform for users to comment on tweets and for everyone to see it. I tend to find that especially in high school, the more proactive bullying happens over Twitter. But what comes with this bigger audience on Twitter, comes bigger consequences. One of the most popular success stories is that of West High School in Iowa City. A group of students made a Twitter account ( @Westhighbros ) releasing positive information about each student so that no one gets forgotten. Their reasoning for creating the Twitter account was to ensure students that they would not be forgotten, which in the long run would make students feel more appreciated and dispose of bullying in the school. Click HERE to learn more about the West High Bros account and how they made an appearance on the nationwide known "The TODAY Show"! The article, 8 Ways Kids are Using Instagram to Bully

When applying to schools and jobs most admissions officers will check an applicant's social media to learn more about who an individual really is. Are you proud of what that person will see? Think of it as an extra application, except this time you did not necessarily have to turn this one in. Instead, every time you hit the vibrant blue "tweet" button, you are submitting new pieces of information for an admissions representative to look at. Weird to think about, right? I think I started to realize this when I entered high school. For one, I was not the type to put all my feelings out on social media for the world to see, so I guess that helped. But I did see the impact that Twitter and other social media could have on my future. Ever since I joined the Burlington High School Help Desk I have made it my goal to have my Twitter be as positive as possible. I actually encourage and want colleges to look at my Twitter and see all the positive things I have done. It could even be the difference between getting into a school and getting denied. The impact of Twitter and other social media is extremely powerful and can absolutely change lives, for better or for worse, it is your choice.
Chandler Joyce Social media sites, such as Instagram, allow users to express themselves through pictures. People are allowed to post as many pictures as they would like and they can control who they are following and who is following them. When someone you are following posts a picture, you can "like" and comment on the picture. Critics complain that Instagram is a gateway for cyberbullying, due to the fact that people are allowed to comment on other users' pictures, but I have to disagree. In my personal experiences with Instagram, I've found the opposite. Whenever I come across a "selfie" or a picture someone has posted of themselves, there is always a flood of compliments underneath the post. Girls in particular tend to have a bad reputation of cyberbullying, but I personally feel that they are the most encouraging ones on social media. Girls are always commenting on other girls' pictures and bragging about how beautiful their picture is. Girls who don't even know each other are compelled to compliment one another. The very few comments that are seen as being negative are those from close friends or family and are meant as a joke. The only times I ever see truly hateful comments are those on the pictures that celebrities have posted. Although I am not condoning this negativity, celebrities are trained to ignore this animosity because they know that not everyone will be their fan, and that as long as people are talking about them, they are doing something right.
Another issue people have with instagram is the constant competition for likes on posts. Some people believe that the more likes a user gets, the more popular they are, which is not true. The Instagram users that get the most likes are the ones that have the most followers. For example, someone who has one hundred followers is not going to get the same amount of likes as someone who has one thousand followers. If users want to get more followers in order to get more likes, they can put themselves out there by following many accounts or making their Instagram public. By gaining more followers and becoming more interactive on Instagram, the obsessiveness over the amount of likes on a post will subside. Now, just because I have never experienced cyberbullying on Instagram doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. If an Instagram user is being harassed, they are allowed to delete spiteful comments and block the user. Also, people can report unwanted comments and harmful Instagram users, and the reported user will then be reviewed by a team of Instagram employees. If this profile is reported more than once, or contains inappropriate and insulting content, the account will be suspended or deleted. Instagram is designed to be a safe and positive way for users to display their life to their followers.
With the ever expanding world of social media, whether we like it or not, global perceptions are formed based on how we communicate as members of our digital society. These perceptions can be positive or negative and to some degree influenced and shaped by how we are using digital tools. I admit while social media has its share of negative views, I also believe the positives outweigh them. This beliefs stems from using social media tools and more specifically, YouTube. I use YouTube as a means of relaxing, entertainment, and education. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past decade and haven't heard about it, YouTube is a multipurpose website that offers many different ideas such as browsing popular videos, listening to music, or uploading and sharing a video. One of the things I love about YouTube are "YouTubers" or the people around the world who use professionally and I enjoy YouTubers who play video games as part of their channel. Shiv Shukla With the ever expanding world of social media, whether we like it or not, global perceptions are formed based on how we communicate as members of our digital society. These perceptions can be positive or negative and to some degree influenced and shaped by how we are using digital tools. I admit while social media has its share of negative views, I also believe the positives outweigh them. This beliefs stems from using social media tools and more specifically, YouTube. I use YouTube as a means of relaxing, entertainment, and education. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past decade and haven't heard about it, YouTube is a multipurpose website that offers many different ideas such as browsing popular videos, listening to music, or uploading and sharing a video. One of the things I love about YouTube are "YouTubers" or the people around the world who use professionally and I enjoy YouTubers who play video games as part of their channel.
There are many different kinds of YouTubers who upload videos called Let's Plays. For you adults who are reading this, Let's Plays are videos that YouTubers upload of themselves playing a game requested by the audience. YouTube allows for people to communicate with YouTubers of their liking. Many people see YouTubers as idols or role models because these YouTubers know how to connect with the audience and relate to them. This is extremely important because connecting with the audience is a vital part in introducing positive ideas that people will accept. The article 8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully mentioned how bullies can leave cruel remarks in the comments, and while this does happen in YouTube, the number of positive comments outshine the negative remarks significantly. With YouTube, the user also has the option of disabling comments or having certain people reported so that they cannot view their videos anymore. This a tool YouTubers use to remove negativity from their videos and thus create a more positive environment for the user as well as the targeted audience. My favorite YouTuber, who is the number one YouTuber in the world with a subscriber count of more than 42 million and rising, has utilized his popularity to start up charities. He refers to his audiences as his "bros" which really connects with people in a humorous way. The charities that he has organized have raised more than $1 million, demonstrating his use of social media as a way to bring about positive changes in the community. The water campaign 's goal was to raise $250,000, but with his positivity and aptitude to make people laugh and connect with him on his channel, he surpassed his goal and is now raising over $400,000 for the water campaign. This shows how connecting with communities and caring for them with tools such as YouTube can lead to powerful and innovative ideas that can help people around the world.
Quentin Inglis One of the most frequently used sites on the internet is YouTube. I can confidently say that everyone has used YouTube at least once. For the very few that don't already know, YouTube is a site that has allowed people to post and stream videos easily since 2005. I use YouTube quite frequently for my own personal use. I plan to start using it professionally as well. People who use YouTube professionally or "YouTubers" can become a partner with YouTube and get paid for their videos after gaining popularity. They can use the money they earn for whatever they want. In other words, people can make a living off of YouTube. For years I have only dreamed of using YouTube the same way these internet icons do everyday.
Many YouTubers excel above the rest and try to make a difference. For example, my personal favorite YouTuber, Mark Fischbach AKA Markiplier , one of the most popular gaming YouTubers at 12 million subscribers at the time of this post, does charity livestreams and frequently donates tens of thousands of dollars because he feels that because of his popularity he can make a difference in the world. His fan base is one of the most close knit groups of people I have ever seen. People donate because of him and he is an inspiration to people everywhere. Another example would be Felix Kjellberg AKA Pewdiepie . He has the most subscribers on YouTube and uses his fame to do charity events like Mark. Similar to Mark, his fanbase is very involved in these charity events.

For my ILE this semester , I will be creating my own YouTube channel in attempts to bring people together through their love of videogames under the alias "Logix", the channel will be up and running very soon with the first video so stay tuned. I will also be working in collaboration with some of my friends who have decided to start a YouTube channel along side me. My current goal is 50 subscribers, I hope to inspire them to make a difference in the world and try to make the world a better place. Someday I hope to use YouTube the
Lucas Townsend A social media tool that I use often is Twitter. Twitter is my favorite social media because it allows its users to connect with celebrities, companies, or even their friends. Twitter can also be very beneficial for students. Students can follow their principal's or the school district's Twitter accounts to get notified about school cancellations or any other important events going on in the school such as the school musical, sporting events, and any other information that the school wants students to be aware of. I use Twitter in a very positive and professional way. First of all, I never Tweet anything that would make me look bad or harm my reputation because any future employers/college admissions employees could be looking at my profile. Second, I make sure to follow my friends and accounts run by the school. This way I can receive important notifications from the school and I can learn about exciting things that happened to my friends such as getting accepted into their top choice colleges. Twitter can also be used in professional ways that help prepare you for a successful future.
One example of professional use of Twitter I participated in, was a student led Twitter chat. This was the very first time I used Twitter to have a live conversation with other students at different schools. In the Twitter chat, the leaders Tweet out questions with the hashtag, #techteamMA, and we have to respond to each question. The topic of this Twitter chat is how the Help Desk can help the student population at BHS and other similar schools. Another way that Twitter could be used professionally is networking. Networking is meeting other people in the same job field you are looking into and making connections. This is important because it can help you land a job/internship. My future career aspirations include entering the business world. Through my research, I have learned businesses are heavy users of social media, one example being Nike. Nike has a Twitter account for their . On this Twitter account, Nike will post updates about the release dates of certain shoes . Nike also will post about promotions . This Twitter account has a massive audience of around 4 million followers. This is a very effective marketing tool, because it is free, it reaches a huge audience, it can help the customers, and it can help increase their revenue. Nike also uses Instagram to display many of their new products or clothing lines.

Networking, promoting, and notifying students about events are some of the many positive ways that students can use social media. However, there is a stereotype that all teenagers use social media irresponsibly and it has no positive use. The article 8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully has some examples of negative social media use, but none of them are commonplace at Burlington High School. I have never seen anybody tag another student under inappropriate photos, write mean comments on somebody's post, or make a fake account for somebody. One thing that occasionally does happen is someone will post an embarrassing screenshot from Snapchat or Facetime. They are never anything too bad, just the person making a funny face. This is always done by friends in good fun. If a person is genuinely upset about the photo, their friend will most likely remove it. Cyber bullying has the same consequences as real life bullying. Teens can get in trouble, and people will think less of them for being a bully. In the article, it said that people can make mean comments on photos, but this can happen in real life too. People can make rude comments about your looks or outfit. There will always be mean people in life, and the internet can be another outlet for them. In the event that someone posts a mean comment on your photo, you can remove it. While there are some problems with social media, the benefits far outweigh them.
Dharini Kapadia Social media is a powerful tool for Internet users. It is a way to communicate, interact and learn from other individuals or companies. Social media gives one the ability to learn from people all over the world. Twitter for example is an excellent way to communicate with other people, groups, or companies. It is a way for a person to share their ideas and connect with the people that have the same mindset as them. Twitter is also a way for an individual to explore new thoughts, beliefs and concepts as other people across the world. It is an amazing example of a online social connect. Twitter is an ideal source of social media for personal and educational use. One quintessential example of social media used for educational purposes is a twitter chat.
Recently, the students from the Burlington High School Help Desk had a Twitter chat on the educational use of technology in schools. During the Twitter chat, the students of the Burlington help desk communicated with other students in help desks of surrounding towns. They conversed about how students tech teams help to maintain technical devices and use their time and resources to help their schools. Teachers and students all over the state were involved in this Twitter chat responding and sharing their ideas about this topic.

Twitter however, like other social medians, is also a source for cyber bullying. Many people have blamed social media for unwanted stress on people, especially youth. Like Intsagram, people have seen a significant amount of harassment on the victims' pictures and posts. According to this many people receive hate comments on their posts. A way to help this situation would be to change the settings. Instagram has a setting for the account holder to control its posts. Account holders on Instagram have control on who sees their posts or who is allowed to follow them. With proper precautions and little more attention of security, Instagram along with many other social mediums, can stop cyberbullying.

Even though all social mediums have a way to protect from and block out cyber bullies, one of the easiest ways to stop cyberbullying is to create a positive social aura. If people who use social media are smart about the ways they use their online accounts, the cyberbullies have no way to reach out towards them. I personally use social in a very positive manner with my 20% individual learning endeavor (ILE) project in my technology integration class. In my technology integration class, we have the option to find something that we truly care about and expand our knowledge on that which is worth 20% of our grade. My ILE has made me the youth organizer of the upcoming TEDxYouth event at Burlington High School. I use various social media to promote the event. This would be a way to social media positively. I will be using social media to promote the education TedxYouth which affects me and many others in a positive manner. Making my social presence positive on the internet is an excellent way to stop cyberbullying.
Donnie Boermeester
Jillian Peluso One of my favorite quotes is, "mean people are just mean." This isn't just true in real life but online as well. There will forever be mean people in the world and when they decide to be negative, don't let it bring you down with them. I have created a Twitter page that is dedicated to posting positive daily quotes which I also write down in the Help Desk. This Twitter page is meant to bring some positivity into someone's life. When they see their daily positive quote, that may inspire them to do more good and less mean. Like I said, there will always be mean people on the internet, but that is a known risk you are taking when you post anything to social media. JhymonMoodie Looking at how things are in the realm of social media, anyone could say that it is in a very negative place. In my opinion though, Tumblr (with few exceptions of course) is combatting that. Tumblr is a platform where you can create a personal 'blog' about anything you would like. Essentially, Tumblr allows you express your personal interests among others and anyone else who may stumble across your page. You can follow your friends of course, and other blogs who post other amazing things regarding your interests. The great thing about Tumblr is that is positive reinforcement. Because you have entered into a community of people who like the things you do, it's simply all love. Another cool thing that separates Tumblr from the rest of the social media platforms these days is that you can message anyone. You can click or tap on your message tab and shoot a message to that one blogger who posts everything that you can directly relate to, and hope he/she isn't too busy and helps you through whatever it is you're facing. With this type of positivity going around on Tumblr, the main hope is that other people will take that energy and spread it across the internet. You can check out my Tumblr blog, that is all dedicated to hip hop music here . Adam Princiotta
Social media tools like Twitter can be used in many ways. Prior to taking Help Desk I used to tweet pointless things that nobody really cared about. Also, because of my age, my Twitter was never really up to par. Now, after maturing and learning how social media can affect me, I've started using my Twitter in a different way. I took a more professional stance on my profile; from my profile picture, to the context of what I tweet. With school being the more prominent topic of my Twitter, I now understand that I should align myself with professionals. The reason for this is that I plan to create a network in hopes of landing future job opportunities. Maturing definitely plays a big role in how social media is used. For instance, when I created my Twitter three years ago, I had no intention of using it for professional networking.

Social media is not used as a way to spread negativity as much as the blog post, 8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully says. A majority of users on social media use it for positive reasons, either posting happy or funny moments and also complimenting each other. A social media site that can be used both personally and professionally is a live streaming website called Twitch.tv . Live streams can last from a few minutes to more than twenty-four hours.

There are many famous Twitch streamers who conduct charity streams. One in particular, JoshOG, ran a charity stream that raised over $25,000 from viewer donations for children with cancer. At the end of the stream, because of the generosity of donors, he decided to donate $10,000 of his own money to the charity. He keeps his streams positive by thanking every person who donates, subscribes and even people who have joined for the first time. He is building a positive community where everyone cheers him on and gives each other advice. There are bots and moderators that stop people that are spamming comments and he bans people from typing in the chat if they are spreading negativity. With over 900,000 followers, it can be tough to keep up with the people who post negativity, but he does his best to stay positive.

Twitch.tv can be also be used personally. As long as someone has the software, which is free to download, they can stream. It is great to stream you talking and playing with friends. It saves all of your broadcasts so that you can go back and rewatch the fun you had. Despite the negative uses of social media, as pointed out in the article, it can be used positively, to spread happiness, and as a way to collaborate to help others. Twitch has a feature where you can host someone else's stream. Basically, popular users host smaller channels. When you click on the big user's channel, it shows the other channel's stream. This is great for growing communities.
BHS Took the Challenge...Now It's Your Turn!
Not everyone uses social media to spread positivity, but I have seen many profiles on many different media platforms that do. The article claimed that students take screenshots and post embarrassing pictures from facetime, but based on my experiences, people do not take and post pictures from facetime onto social media sites. Sometimes my friends and I will share pictures in our group chats; we laugh at them for a few minutes and move on. Social media is not a tool to spread negativity, rather it is a great way to connect with many communities and spread positivity.

As the co-founder of the digital citizenship Twitter chat and the National and International Digital Citizenship Summits, Marialice is dedicated to showcasing how social media can be used by students in a positive, safe, and ethical manner. She, along with so many other educators dedicated to changing online student behavior for the better, knows that modeling appropriate behavior is crucial for meaningful change to happen. I feel fortunate to work in a district where students are allowed access to digital tools so they can emerge as digital role models for their peers.

So often negative stories about social media misuse by young people dominate the headlines, however Marialice and I are passionate about sharing all the positive ways social media is being used by not just our students, but students across the globe. As co-moderators of the #digcit chat, we don't just want to talk about positive digital citizenship, we want to show concrete examples of doing digital citizenship. In others words, as Marialice has stated over and over, we believe digital citizenship needs to be a verb. Therefore, we have created a new, challenged based format for the digital citizenship Twitter chats. Our challenge for the month of April is for schools to integrate Snapchat in a positive way. This can be for an individual classroom teacher, grade level, a school, or an entire district. For more details on why we are changing the format, check out our latest post about how Burlington Public Schools will be meeting the April Digital Citizenship Challenge.

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12 Students Speak Out About Digital Citizenship

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Editor's Note: Recently, Dr. Marialice Curran shared the article "8 Ways Kids Are Using Instagram to Bully" via Twitter along with a challenge to schools nationwide to provide a rebuttal. I decided to take Marialice up on this challenge. I assigned the Help Desk students of Burlington High School to read the article and write a...

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses.

But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth.

News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news. All of this is compounded by the glories and the drawbacks of user-generated content, citizen journalism, and a world of new news choices.

Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. (The Verification Handbooks are a wonderful lens into this complicated process.) The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics lists four guiding principles; the first of which is seek truth and report it.

Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction.

And word choice itself is connected to truth. Over the course of the last decade we've seen professional news organizations and governments struggle with the politics and potential loadedness of words, notably terrorist and illegal immigrant. (See the AP Stylebook Blog and Reuters Handbook of Journalism.)
On news literacy
In its glossary, Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as:

The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

Our kids need new types of filters. Beyond larger notions of information literacy, I see the case for a specific focus on news literacy. Not as a lesson of good vs. bad. Not as an attempt to pitch traditional media against social media or peer review against popular publication. Not through the examination of hoaky hoax sites. And certainly not as a one-of, checklist type of lesson for a 9th grade social studies teacher in September.

We need to teach the important lessons of everyday civics for new consumption and production landscapes. These lessons involve sustained critical thinking, a practice to engage in regularly as we read and view and inquire with learners of all ages acros s disciplines.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy assessed the news literacy of students from middle school through college.

Students were asked to perform such tasks as: determine the trustworthiness of tweets, distinguish between news articles and opinion columns, identify ads on a news website, compare and evaluate posts from a newspaper's comment section, identify the blue checkmark that distinguishes a verified Facebook account from a fake one, consider the relative strength of evidence presented by two posters in a Facebook exchange, decide whether or not to trust a photo on a photo-sharing website, determine whether a website can be trusted in an open web search, search to verify a claim about a controversial issue, assess the reliability of a partisan website, identify the strengths and weaknesses of an online video. (p. 6) (Note: Most of these tasks could authentically be taught in our libraries during the natural course of any inquiry project.)

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners' political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who's behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation . . .

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish. (pp. 5-6)

I see a serious need for librarians to build a few seaworthy arks from the news media flood to aid students in discerning credibility, reliability, and bias in context of their information needs and the context of the text itself. I can see us introducing the broad notion of triangulation to children for whom the word may be difficult to say.
What's going on? Fake news
In the weeks leading up to the election we were drawn to stories about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and WikiLeaks' confirmation that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

Fake news is not new. But its potential for virality is and our awareness of it is newly awakened. Some suggested it played a role in the outcome of the election. Google and Facebook both announced that they would try to eliminate fake news from appearing in their result lists and newsfeeds by blocking fake news sources from using their ad networks.

This video TEDEd by Damon Brown offers a student-friendly explanation as well as strategies for analyzing news sources:

And fake news is but one flavor of news that is less than accurate. It is but one bucket into which readers and viewers should sort types of truthiness.

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

Pure fake news sites use fabricated stories to lure traffic, encourage clicks (click bait), influence or profit using intentionally deceptive, but highly intriguing, often sensational information.

Hoax sites also share false information with the intention to trick readers/viewers

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

Born digital images and edited images alter and often misrepresent visual reality

In addition, sometimes journalists just get things wrong. Their sources they choose to interview may not offer truth or a full picture. Stories reported in process lack the wisdom of hindsight and may be missing full context.
Post-truth or truthiness
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. Oxford defines the word as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

It is well worth noting that the concept is not new. Oxford traces post-truth's history from a peripheral term simmering for at least a decade to its dramatic spike this year: in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particu lar noun, in the phrase "post-truth politics."

Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

While we need to reject the notion of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.

Credibility decisions are complicated. Most news is not simply fake or true. News from traditional sources can be suspect as well. Professional journalists engage in rigorous fact-checking and adhere to sets of professional ethics, but they are not entirely immune to bias or agenda or the pressures of a deadline. A single story may tell a part of a larger story at the moment of its publishing. Of course, traditional newspapers feature writing of all sorts-straight reporting, editorials, features, columns, advertisements and comments in their digital versions. Several traditional news sources are to various degrees either right or left leaning. While some admit their bias, others do not.

It is impossible to dismiss the complication that our political news consumption habits have shifted. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in disseminating political information during the past election season. A May 2016 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In terms of the total population, this translates to social media news reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. Consider this results of this report in the context of with the decline of the newspaper industry also documented by recent Pew Research Center data.

Some Rules of thumb:

Check About and About me pages: Clicking on or investigate authors names to consider their credentials in context should be a regular part of the research journey. (See other tricks below.)

Interrogate urls: We see quite a bit of domain manipulation these days. For instance, what looks like an .edu domain, followed by .co or "lo" is likely a fake or deceptive site. If you are you seeing a slightly variant version of a well-known URL, do a little investigating.

Suspect the sensational: When we see something posted that looks sensational, it is even more important to be skeptical. Exaggerated and provocative headlines with excessive use of capital letters or emotional language are serious red flags.

Go back to the source: When an article mentions a study, if you can, go directly to the source and check its bona fides as well.

Go back to the story again (and again): When was the story written? What is its context? Breaking news will continue to break. Early reports are built from limited information so you'll want to watch a story grow into a fuller picture.

Think outside the reliability box: The old checklist-type tools we used to evaluate websites do not necessarily work. ACRL's Framework reminds us that the notion of reliability can be fluid. Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. On Twitter's 10th birthday this year, Poynter, the respected journalism portal, listed 10 Twitter How Tos -guides for using Twitter for journalism from its own archive. Students can benefit from these tips too.

Triangulate: Try to verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases. You can begin to rule out the hoaxes by checking out sites like the nonprofit, nonpartisan FactCheck.org, or popular sites like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer.

What exactly are you reading?: Even when you find yourself in a traditional news site, identify what type of writing you are reading. Is it news reporting, or a feature story, or an editorial, or work by a guest blogger, or a review, or an op-ed or a disguised ad, or a comment?

Check your own search attitude and biases: Is your search language biased in any way? Are you paying more attention to the information that confirms your own beliefs and ignoring evidence that does not?

Use a little energy: Have you simply satisficed or have you done your due diligence in seeking and validating the best possible sources across media sources?

Stop before you forward (or use): When you see a widely shared or forwarded link, be suspicious of a hoax or a fake story. Can you verify the information outside of the social media platform on which you discovered it?

Be suspicious of pictures!: Not all photographs tell truth or unfiltered truth. Images are normally edited or process, but sometimes they are digitally manipulated. Some are born digital. A Google reverse image search can help discover the source of an image and its possible variations.

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

Infographics are carefully constructed visual media messages. The data, the evidence, the sources, and the arguments they present beg careful deconstruction, scrutiny and analysis. (See my post.)
Some news literacy vocabulary to introduce in talking about credibility:

cloaked sites appear unbiased and professional but actually advocate on behalf of an organization or cause while concealing their true sources of funding and purpose.

confirmation bias: the tendency to believe information is credible if it conforms to the reader's/viewer's existing belief system, or not credible if it does not conform

container collapse: my own term for our trouble discerning the original information container, format or information type-blog, book, pamphlet, government document, chapter, magazine, newspaper, journal, or section of the newspaper or magazine or journal-once publishing cues are removed and every source looks like a digital page or a printout.

content farm or content mill: a company that employs a staff of freelance writers to create content designed to satisfy search engine retrieval algorithms with the goal of attracting views and advertising revenue.

In news media an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an "enclosed" system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresentedecho chamber: "." (Wikipedia)

fact checking: the act of verifying assertions either prior to publication or after dissemination of the content

filter bubble: When search tools present with the stories we are likely to click on or share based on our past activity, potentially affirming our biases, we need may be experiencing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble,

herding phenomenon: as more journalists begin to cover a story, even more journalists are likely to join the herd, imitating the angle the story initially took rather than developing alternate or original approaches or angles.

native advertising: paid, sponsored content designed to look like the legitimate content produced by the media outlet

satisficing: a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice introduced by Herbert Simon in 1956 to refer to the tendency of people, bounded by time limitations, to select good enough information over optimal information

sockpuppet: an online identify created to pose as a party unaffiliated with the media puppeteer in order to deceive.

triangulation or cross verification: Researchers establish validity by using several research methods and by analyzing and examining multiple perspectives and sources in the hope that diverse viewpoints will can shed greater light on a topic.

virality: the rapid circulation of media from one user to another. When we forward sensational stories, often from social media without checking their credibility in other sources, we increase their virality.

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Though aimed at university students, this important document reframes the way we consider authority and is well worth examining with high school students and faculty. The Framework recommends the following student dispositions:Learners who are developing their information literate abilities

develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives;

motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be conferred or manifested in unexpected ways;

develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview;

question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews;

are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources: a dynamic Google Doc filled with tips from Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College.

The Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University's School of Journalism, offers an impressive Digital Resources Center that includes

Ripped from the Headlines: Fresh news literacy lessons, based on the latest news, ready to use in class

Course Pack: organized around eight major concepts, the 14-module curriculum takes students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program. Don't miss the very useful new Glossary.

Get a Global View: Instructional resources from the Center's international partners

DIY News Literacy Lessons: Inspiration and lessons templates for creating your own instruction around news literacy concepts.

News Literacy Project: Begun by an LA Times investigative reporter and supported by several newspapers and news organizations, the NLP is an innovative national education program that equips middle school and high school students with the tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens. Don't miss the four modules, lessons and Check Tool in the Checkology Virtual Classroom.

NewseumED: Learning tools on media literacy. Don't miss the Resources for Promoting Dialogue Post Election and Today's Front Pages

Center for Media Literacy: Dedicated to leadership, education and professional development, the pioneering CML offers a free Global OnRamp (in multiple languages) built around its research-based framework and five key questions for deconstructing and constructing media.

Media Education Lab: Teaching Resources: The University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media offers a wealth of resources. Don't miss Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced website that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics, as well as the six-lesson CCSS-aligned high school curriculum unit on contemporary propaganda.

Frank Baker's Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Don't miss the Media's Role in Politics

Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting: Aimed at professional journalists, but very useful for high school, this companion to the Verification Handbook for Emergency Coverage, which addresses breaking news, provides the fundamentals of online search and research techniques for investigations and takes a deeper into techniques for user generated content investigations

Time For Kids shares a video News Matters in which 6th graders discuss what they are learning about critical thinking and the news. critically about the information they come across.

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments an open access resource for faculty and librarians

Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources NYTimes Learning Network

SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy

Teaching Information Literacy Now, from SLJ Librarian of the Year finalist, Laura Gardner

Fake 'News' in a 'Post-truth' World from reflection from Professor Judi Moreillon who shares: Fake "news" and a "post-truth" world call all school librarians to step up and lead

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

FactCheck.org: Annenberg Public Policy Center's nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. Check out the post That Chain E-Mail Your Friend Sent to You is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously, for its Key Characteristics of Bogusness and the Viral Spiral page for claims previously checked

Washington Post's Fact Checker: The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to "truth squad" the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

PolitiFact.com: a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics, run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times. (Note: I discovered their truth-o-meter after I created the little image for this post.)

Snopes: Since way back in the 90s, Snopes has been dispelling urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Hoax-Slayer: Australian Brett Christensen has been debunking email and social media hoaxes and spam since 2003

Craig Silverman's BuzzFeed blog: The founding editor for BuzzFeed, Canada has been writing for many years for a variety of publications on media accuracy and verification issues.

Whois Lookup: This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website

CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose posted by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

Does This Website Smell Funny to You? Amy Gillespie's FART test posted in Knowledge Quest will grab middle schoolers' attention

Evaluating Sources Using the RADAR Framework: RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478.

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

Abilock, Debbie. (2012). True-or not?. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 70-74. Debbie shares her quick and dirty rules of thumb-digital reading strategies, in fact-that will intrigue students, spark their curiosity, and serve as sensible entry points to more sophisticated analyses of ideas. Don't miss the section on Weighing Truths in Wikipedia.

Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy.

Stebbins, Leslie F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Stevenson, Sara. (2016). Information Literacy Lessons Crucial in a Post Truth World. Knowledge Quest.
And finally . . .
Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information. We teach them to deconstruct media messages and construct their own messages. We teach them to interrogate their sources. As the landscape continues to shift, librarians must update our own skill sets and toolkits to guide students in navigating a growingly nuanced universe of news. We must also examine and recognize our own biases so that we are open to contrary and conflicting ideas. This is our banner to wave, our curriculum to co-teach.

Of course, following the paths I've described for critical vetting of the news is work!

This is a new landscape from the one we taught in even five years ago. We need new compasses for navigation.

I do not believe we can stem the tide of fake news and truthiness and political memes and viral rumors and quick rushes to judgment. I do believe that together we can build a few arks.

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world - NeverEndingSearch

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make [...]

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Fact Checking a Post-Fact Society - TMI Flips English

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Fact Checking a Post-Fact Society - TMI Flips English

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I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student say, "I heard/read " where x is something totally crazy.

Like Harambe getting twenty thousand votes in the presidential election.

And I'm so tired of dealing with all these crazy facts.

So it's time to do something about it. I'm calling it Google Search Challenge, and we're doing it every day until my students' reaction upon hearing x is, "Hmm. That doesn't sound right. Let me look that up."

The premise is simple: give my students a statement that is either truth or fiction. Their team has five minutes to find sources on both sides, and one minute of Team Talk to decide on the veracity of the statement as well as the most trustworthy source.

Now, I'm not teaching them any freaking checklists or canned lessons about how to determine whether a website is credible. I've done those. And while they're not terrible, they also miss the point entirely.

To master something, you need LOTS of repetition.

So the Google Search Challenge is an 8 minute assignment that can be completed every day.

After the first round of their fact-checking adventure, I showed them MY best source (the Snopes article linked above the fold). By the next day, almost all of them went to Snopes first.

But the second most popular source the first time around? CNN.

Don't tell me that kids don't know how to fact check.

This may be something like teaching grammar and conventions - they don't use what they already know. They have a pretty good sense of what makes something credible. Just like they probably don't need a lesson in what a capital letter is for, they also don't need a ton of instruction about how to find credible information.

​They've literally been doing it their entire lives.

A TON of Americans get their news from Facebook, which is notoriously bad at fact-checking, and seems designed more to elicit emotional reactions than well-reasoned argument and philosophical discussions.

It's easy to see how a failure to distinguish face from fiction is a hazard to having an informed voting base. And this election cycle has been worse than most in the amount of misinformation and half-truths - from both sides.

So I'm going to keep going with these challenges. Tomorrow, I'm giving them an image out of context. It'll be up to them to find information to determine whether it's real or photoshopped.

And when they finish, I'll teach them Reverse Image Search on Google Images.

​If you don't know how to do that, go read this page now. Chances are, I'll have quite a few students know how to do it already (and if they use it tomorrow, I've got a special reward for them).

​Why? Because the MTV show "Catfish" does it regularly and has for many seasons.

And they say kids don't learn anything from television.

​Want to try this with your own class? Here's my slide deck of challenges so far. Feel free to adapt and add your own, and share them with me when you do!

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I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student say, "I heard/read " where x is something totally crazy. Like Harambe getting twenty thousand votes in the presidential election. And I'm so tired of dealing with all these crazy facts. So it's time to do something about it.

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The Indiana Department of Education celebrates Indiana Digital Citizenship Week the first full week of September following Labor Day. The celebration is part of an ongoing effort to teach students how to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world.

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DON’T TEACH DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP — EMBED IT!

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DON’T TEACH DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP — EMBED IT!

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As experienced teachers, we've been conditioned to reach for curriculum when we have something new to bring to the classroom. But as digital age educators, we also know that kids do best when they can learn something authentically, by figuring out their own answers to real-world problems that are relevant to their lives. You can't teach everything this way, of course, but some concepts - especially those that students will use in their day-to-day lives, now and in the future - lend themselves well to the authentic learning approach.

It was a major a-ha moment when I realized that digital citizenship is one of those things. As one of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students, digital citizenship is a key skill for living and working in a connected world. And I've found that if my students don't learn this important skill set in an authentic way, it will be just another abstract idea that becomes real only when they run into problems down the road. I want to help them avoid those kinds of major mishaps if I can by teaching them how to be good digital citizens now.

The other great thing about authentic learning is that you don't need to devise a separate unit to learn a subject. In fact, I realized that I was already teaching digital citizenship in my classroom. I didn't need to add another lesson to my day. I just needed to be more intentional in the way I was already teaching and using technology in the classroom.

For the past two years, my class and I have been using an app called Seesaw: The Learning Journal for our digital portfolios and workflow. Here are some of the app's features that encourage authentic learning of digital citizenship skills:

Classroom feed. Seesaw lets students add just about anything, from pictures and video to projects they create using other apps, to their digital portfolios. All of this work is visible not only in their individual portfolios, but also on a classroom feed. This means that all students are able to see each other's learning in the classroom, which helps reinforce and augment their learning process. From a digital citizenship perspective, it's also important that the public nature of this feed makes them really think about what they put in their posts, knowing that their peers, their teacher and even their parents will be able to see it.

Teacher approval. I have the power to approve or deny any student submission before it makes it onto the classroom feed. I use this dynamic as a way to set up some useful classroom discussions: What happens when your teacher is no longer there to be your filter? What happens when it's not just your classmates, but your employers who can see your online presence? These are real-life situations presented in a safe place. The is the first step in helping students cultivate a positive digital identity.

Commenting. Students can comment on each other's work - a feature I can choose to turn on or off. I always start the year with commenting in the off position. Why? I've tried allowing commenting right off the bat before, and it failed miserably. Students would make comments like "Awesome!" "Cool!" Emoji, emoji, emoji. These comments were much more distracting than they were valuable to anyone's learning.

But I know that giving and taking constructive feedback are skills my students will need in the future. So I start out with a lesson that lends itself to thoughtful feedback. During this lesson, we talk about expectations and examples of what we want to learn. Students then post their creations, and we discuss together how to give another student feedback that is both valuable and respectful. I also give them sentence starters, such as, "Your post taught me that...," "This made me think of...because...," and "I really liked.... Have you thought of...?"

Once we practice as a class a few times, I turn on the commenting feature. Just like the work itself, their comments come to me first for approval or denial. If approved, they post to the classroom feed under the original submission.

Overall, I have been so impressed by my students' ability to give insightful suggestions while keeping their comments respectful. But when I run across a comment I don't want to approve, I have a one-on-one conversation with the student. I show him or her the comment and explain why it is not appropriate or does not meet expectations. Only then do I deny the comment and ask the student to go back and try writing a new one.

Class blog. While the classroom feed is self-contained and limited to only approved viewers, Seesaw also has a blog feature that allows students to connect globally with other classrooms around the world. This is another great opportunity for my students to have authentic discussions about digital citizenship under the guidance of their teacher.

The open blog spurs them to think about their audience before they post and Seesaw even offers tips to help out with this. Posting to a global audience is much different than posting to your peers in the classroom. We discuss how it is important to be clear and concise with our words when we post to this wider audience. My students are also always quick to point out that our readers may not be native English speakers or may be from another culture. We practice by revising each other's posts with these things in mind as well while correcting spelling and vocabulary.

Once we learn how to post on the blog, we move on to how to give feedback and comment in a respectful manner for the global audience. This is when we get to decide what our digital presence will be: What kind of class do we want others to see? Who are we representing when we post on our blog? Ourselves? Our teacher? Parents? Our school? The world?

By having these conversations with my students in an authentic context, I plant the seeds in their brains that will one day remind them to ask these same questions of themselves before writing that blog entry or posting that picture.
Heather Marrs is a third grade teacher and ed tech teacher leader at Eagle Rock Elementary School in southern Oregon. She is a wife and mother of two, who enjoys spending time with family, dancing and all things ed tech. Follow her on Twitter @hmarrs24 Want to learn more about how to teach digital citizenship? Read Digital Citizenship in Action: Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities by Kristen Mattson.

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Don't teach digital citizenship - embed it!

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As experienced teachers, we've been conditioned to reach for curriculum when we have something new to bring to the classroom. But as digital age educators, we also know that kids do best when they can learn something authentically, by figuring out their own answers to real-world problems that are relevant to their lives.

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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Digital Citizenship For Elementary - MDUSD Ed Tech Unlimited

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A place where you can discover the unlimited potential of your Ed Tech learning.

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URL vs IRL #KidsDeserveIt | kidsdeserveit

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URL vs IRL #KidsDeserveIt | kidsdeserveit

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This is a guest post from Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner is the Social Media Manager at GoGuardian, an edtech software company providing device management solutions that keep students safer online and make teaching easier. Learn more at goguardian.com.

Today's students find themselves in a situation that earlier generations never had to face, and must learn how to navigate two separate lives: URL and IRL. This means that students must learn how to behave not only in their day-to-day, IRL lives (IRL, or, in real life), but also in their online lives (URL, or uniform resource locator, the address of websites). Learning and understanding how to become a valued member of the internet means learning how to become an outstanding digital citizen, which is more important than ever due to the massive technology integration in schools across the globe.

In the modern classroom -- and in the modern, highly connected workplace that today's students will enter -- the value of technology as an instructional resource is increasingly embraced by educators, parents, and students alike. With the new opportunities for more robust and cost-effective resources that technology facilitates, however, come new risks and potential consequences that were not a concern for students in a pre-digital era.

While appropriate monitoring of student's Internet usage is essential, teaching students to be proactive by keeping themselves safe and responsible online is the best way to prevent online abuses, like cyberbullying and contact from predators, and privacy breaches,which are often the result of oversharing online.

Teaching students these eight rules will help ensure their online interactions remain positive, and empower them to be responsible digital citizens for the rest of their lives.

Be careful what you share! Comments, social media posts, photos, and anything else you share online is not guaranteed to be protected from online predators or hackers, even if you're sharing only to specific people on password-protected sites. Always remember the golden rule of the internet: only post things that you're okay with everyone seeing.

Be safe. Although being safe online is a large, important topic, it is different from being a good digital citizen, and carries different ramifications. It's crucial to never divulge any personal information, like passwords, home addresses, phone numbers, and other information that identifies you with someone you don't know. For more detailed information on Internet safety tips, read post for parents about keeping .

Four Digital "Don'ts"

Considering giving students their own devices for classwork and homework? Get all the expert advice and tips for every stage of the process with the Educator's Complete Digital Learning Guide.

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This is a guest post from Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner is the Social Media Manager at GoGuardian, an edtech software company providing device management solutions that keep students safer online and make teaching easier. Learn more at goguardian.com.

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Digital Learning Guide for Educators | GoGuardian

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Download GoGuardian's The Complete Guide to Going 1:1 eBook to find out everything you need to know about deployment, management, and organization of devices in schools.

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A video posted last week showing young teen and preteen girls meeting a stranger they met online shocked parents nationwide. The fact that they were so willing to disclose personal information--including their phone numbers, home addresses, and whether or not their parents were home--was a worst-case scenario for their parents. Unfortunately, for those of us working in the Internet safety realm, their actions hardly came as a surprise. This video was instead one example of a phenomenon we often see with Centennials, the generation containing everyone under 18 in 2015.

Digital natives--as Centennials are dubbed-- tend to view online and offline interactions as part of the same reality. The Internet's scope makes it easy for like-minded people to find each other as well as a greater number of people to interact with extensively. The ability to communicate with someone who is very much like you, and that you've specifically chosen as a friend, creates a bond that is extremely hard to find in everyday life. Therefore, these Digital Natives are much more trusting of people they meet online than are the adults in their lives; those who remember a time without social media and online chat rooms, and only had relationships based in the physical world. This is likely to increase even more as the younger half of the Centennials generation--whose parents use technology for everything from reading them bedtime stories to potty training--enter school.

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which was passed by Congress in 2000 and went into effect in 2001, is now older than most of the children it's designed to protect. As a result, CIPA's implications have changed for educators relying on rapidly evolving technology to teach and communicate with students. Devices like Chromebooks create a learning environment that is more engaging to Centennials and provides unprecedented access to educational resources. In the same breath, school administrators often find themselves overwhelmed by the legal and ethical responsibilities of keeping students safe online, especially since few have experience rolling out and integrating technological solutions districtwide. An important first step to managing rollouts more effectively is identifying the most common issues students face online.

1. Cyberbullying

School bullying is not a new phenomenon, but the ability for online bullies to follow victims into their own bedrooms is. While traditional bullying relies on an imbalance of power created by physical intimidation or verbal harassment, the danger of cyberbullying comes from an imbalance of power surrounding technological fluency and/or the ability for bullies to remain anonymous. Part of the danger of cyberbullying stems from the size of the audience that students can reach online. Unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying incidents can be made effectively permanent when posted on online platforms. The trauma is often relived every time a victim re-reads a harassing post or message and follows students home where they once felt safe from harassment. It is also difficult to predict which students are more likely to be involved with cyberbullying as either victims or perpetrators-- research shows that they are just as likely to be class clowns as they are straight-A students.

Cyberbullying incidents are often an extension of offline problems or "revenge" for perceived wrongdoing--making schools an important source of prevention and intervention efforts. The story of 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick, who committed suicide after a year and a half of being cyberbullied, is one of many examples of how real the trauma of cyberbullying can be. Unlike traditional bullying--where attacks end once students leave the physical presence of their bullies--cyberbullying follows kids home and into their bedrooms.
Cyberbullying Statistics:

1 in 3 young people report having experienced an incident that felt threatening to their mental, physical, or emotional well-being

1 in 5 repeatedly cyberbullied teens contemplate suicide

1 in 10 repeatedly cyberbullied teens attempt suicide

4 out of 10 teens say they have been bullied more than once online

Only 10% of victims inform a parent or adult of their abuse (most cite fear that the adult will blame them for it, or overreact and make the situation worse).

Online filtering and monitoring software can help schools better identify cyberbullies and prevent harassing materials of or about students from becoming viral. Consistency of intervention is cited as an important measure contributing to the effectiveness of school-based anti-cyberbullying initiatives, which makes defining cyberbullying and streamlining appropriate responses a challenge for administrators. The following steps are considered by many experts to be best practices to develop an effective program against cyberbullying:

Identify online actions of concern: Intimidating language, threats, personal attacks, etc.

Identify likely sources of school-based conflict or offline bullying (which often links directly to online bullying).

Find a tool that alerts educators to concerning phrases or keyword searches on student devices.

Develop an effective and timely intervention program for problematic behavior and searches.

Demonstrate consistent discipline practices: Students are often hesitant to alert parents or teachers to online victimization out of fear that disproportionate responses will make the situation worse.

Further, consistent but relatively minor consequences are more effective against cyberbullying than zero-tolerance policies with severe and inconsistent consequences.

2. Sexual Solicitation and Exposure to Sexual Content

Exposure to sexual or otherwise inappropriate content and victimization from online predators are the two biggest concerns parents and administrators face when giving students online access. A recent study found that one in five youth experienced unwanted sexual solicitation online, yet most children who experience aggressive sexual solicitations never mention it to an adult. Certain students are at a higher risk of experiencing sexual solicitation online, including:

Older youth (aged 14-17);

Youth who experienced hardship (death in the family, relocation, divorced parents, unemployed parents, absent parents);

Youth who frequent pornographic websites; and

Youth who use vulgar language in chat rooms, emails, and online forums.

Such issues can be prevented through comprehensive monitoring and filtering software, as well as nonjudgmental approaches to discussing appropriate online activity with students. Kids and teens often feel embarrassed about viewing sexual content online--whether they accessed it intentionally or unintentionally--so it is important that parents and educators don't exacerbate feelings of shame when students are exposed to such material.

Aggressive sexual solicitation involves sexual solicitations that contain offline outlets as well--which can include mail, requests to meet in person, or physical gifts. Such aggressive solicitations are less common than exposure to inappropriate content online--though often more concerning because they imply potential breaches of privacy and other bodily risks.

Parents and educators can use tools to filter inappropriate content from kids' laptops, to prevent them from accidentally or intentionally accessing websites that could be harmful.

3. Maintaining Privacy

Teaching students to not disclose personal or private information online (such as pictures, videos, and their address or phone number) can dramatically reduce the risk of cyberbullying, sexual solicitation, and identity theft. As the video of young girls sharing their home addresses and phone numbers with someone they met online shows, however, many do not realize the potential implications sharing personal information can have.

The story of Audrie Pott, who committed suicide after fellow students posted humiliating pictures of her online, calls attention to how dangerous breaches of privacy can be. Privacy breaches are especially problematic when they cross with other risks kids face online--like cyberbullying in this case. In addition to effective monitoring tools, open communication with students and a fast response by administrators can prevent a minor infraction from turning tragic.

4. The Generational (or Communication) Gap

Children tend to view their lives online and offline as one and the same, whereas adults tend to view them as separate spheres. Having spent the majority of their life interacting with technology, children have an inherent advantage when it comes to navigating the Internet. The only way parents and educators can close this generational disparity is to open clear communication channels with students. Centennials are more comfortable online than adults, so maintaining a consistent dialogue with them regarding the risks they may face online--including cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, and privacy--is the best way to protect them from aspects of the Internet that they're not prepared for.

If you're interested in learning more about how safe online access and shaping student behavior, visit our website for more information about how our software works. If you're an educator in a school that uses Chromebooks, you can also sign up for a free 30-day trial of GoGuardian. Our comprehensive monitoring, filtering, and device-recovery software is the only tool you need to keep kids safe online.

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A video posted last week showing young teen and preteen girls meeting a stranger they met online shocked parents nationwide. The fact that they were so willing to disclose personal information--including their phone numbers, home addresses, and whether or not their parents were home--was a worst-case scenario for their parents.

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Excited2launch our @campbellusd #digcit site today! https://t.co/WAY85neuj6 #TOSAchat #ETcoaches @LindseyBlass1 pic.twitter.com/8o3aCNmvZn
— Amanda Haughs (@MsHaughs) August 18, 2016

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Future of Privacy Forum and ConnectSafely Release Educator’s Guide to Student Data Privacy

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Future of Privacy Forum and ConnectSafely Release Educator’s Guide to Student Data Privacy

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Melanie Bates, Director of Communications,[email protected]
Contact: Hani Khan, Outreach Manager,[email protected]
FUTURE OF PRIVACY FORUM AND CONNECTSAFELY RELEASE EDUCATOR'S GUIDE TO STUDENT DATA PRIVACY
Washington, DC - Today, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and ConnectSafely are releasing the Educator's Guide to Student Data Privacy. Technology tools and applications are changing the way schools and teachers educate students across the country. New resources are making it easier for teachers and students to communicate in and outside of the classroom making learning a 24/7 activity. When schools use technology, a student's personal information is often collected and shared for the purpose of furthering their education. The Educator's Guide will help teachers utilize technology in the classroom responsibly and protect their students' privacy, explaining among other things:

Why student privacy matters, including legal requirements;

Teachers options for vetting an app for privacy considerations; and

Available resources, including a quick reference checklist for teachers to use as they continue to incorporate technology.

The Educator's Guide follows the success of the Parent's Guide to Student Data Privacy, which was jointly developed by ConnectSafely and FPF to help parents understand the laws and regulations in place to protect their child's personally identifiable information. The Educator's Guide will help teachers understand their role in protecting students' information and ensuring students use classroom technology in a responsible way.

"Schools across the country are rapidly integrating new technologies meant to deliver a quality education to students in more effective and efficient manner. The Educator's Guide will be a vital new resource for teachers when helping students use educational applications and technology in a safe way that protects their data privacy," said Kobie Pruitt, Education Policy Manager, FPF.

"As a teacher who knows first-hand how technology tools have helped my students feel empowered to find the resources they need, collaborate with one another and with me, and create professional quality work I know we are in the midst of a transformational time for education. Teachers want to both inspire and protect their students, and this guide will help them feel confident they are doing both when using technology," said Kerry Gallagher, Director of K-12 Education for ConnectSafely.

FPF and ConnectSafely are proud to help educators implement new technologies responsibly in order to promote successful student outcomes. To view and download the Educator's Guide to Student Data Privacy and many other online privacy and safety resources, please visit FERPA|SHERPA and ConnectSafely.
The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) is a Washington, DC based think tank that seeks to advance responsible data practices. Learn more about ConnectSafely.org is a Silicon Valley, Calif.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to educating users of connected technology about safety, privacy and security with research-based safety tips, parents' guidebooks, advice, news and commentary on all aspects of tech use and policy. .

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Future of Privacy Forum and ConnectSafely Release Educator's Guide to Student Data Privacy

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Melanie Bates, Director of Communications,[email protected] Contact: Hani Khan, Outreach Manager,[email protected] FUTURE OF PRIVACY FORUM AND CONNECTSAFELY RELEASE EDUCATOR'S GUIDE TO STUDENT DATA PRIVACY Washington, DC - Today, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and ConnectSafely are releasing the Educator's Guide to Student Data Privacy.

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How to Take Digital Citizenship Schoolwide During the 2016 17 School Year | EdSurge News

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How to Take Digital Citizenship Schoolwide During the 2016 17 School Year | EdSurge News

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Since our students are using technology to play, learn, and communicate while at home and at school, they should be learning how to use that technology responsibly. Full integration of digital citizenship (or DigCit) curriculum into every class and every content area-at every grade level-should be the goal to meet this need.

Keep in mind that most teacher-prep programs do not incorporate digital citizenship alongside the other elements of teacher education. Here is how we trained all the teachers in our school-St. John's Prep in Massachusetts-as well as the lessons we learned along the way and our recommendations for what might work in your school, too.

Step 1: Clear Institution-Wide Communication

All stakeholders must have a clear understanding of both the "why" and the "how" of fully integrated digital citizenship. Start with school leadership. Administrators should agree:

1. Why is digital citizenship a necessary element in 21st century education, and why is a fully-integrated approach best?

2. How does digital citizenship fit into your school's vision, mission, and/or values statements?

3. How will each stakeholder-teachers, administrators, and parents-contribute to meeting the goal of full integration?

Once these questions have been answered, it is time to communicate clear goals and plans to everyone.

For teachers, use emails or newsletters and department/team or faculty meeting agendas. Be thorough to make sure every teacher is on board.

For parents, start talking about digital citizenship education at PTO or parent council meetings, webinars, email or paper newsletters, and announcements at events that pull in large crowds.

For students, be sure they hear that they will now be both supported and held accountable for their behavior when using technology. At school and at home, the adults who care about them will be ready to help when they are overwhelmed, and will set limits when they are struggling to find balance.

Step 2: Digital Citizenship PD Starts with Flipped Learning

Since time is precious, we designed this website specifically for our faculty to "flip" part of the professional development. There are four modules on that site:

1. What is DigCit?: Define digital citizenship and its subtopics to create a common language for your school. Mike Ribble's 9 elements of digital citizenship are an industry standard, but every school community has unique needs. For our school we narrowed digital citizenship to four topics: etiquette, communication and responsibility, identity and personal brand, and privacy and safety.

2. Learning: Next, provide models of what full-integration looks like in the classroom. With the permission of a few teachers in our school, we highlighted their lessons that were shining examples.

3. Management: Explain and provide examples of how digital citizenship can help teachers and students manage their attention and behavior in classrooms and schools.

4. Readiness: Include information on what skills colleges and employers want graduates to have. We explained how digital citizenship can help students practice and refine these skills.

Mike Ribble's 9 elements of digital citizenship. (Source: Fractus Learning)

The flipped modules took teachers one hour or less to complete and included interactive activities along the way. We used the data from these activities to shape the next phase of integration.

Step 3: In-Person PD Translates Theory into Practice

For the face-to-face component, we recommend two 2-hour sessions. Find this time during half-day professional learning days, or faculty or department meetings.

Goal 1: Debrief the content from the flipped modules. Give teachers time to talk about what they've learned from the flipped modules with their colleagues. We used real world scenarios to help spark conversations and then followed up with a few insightful direct quotes submitted by our faculty members during the flipped modules.

Goal 2: Curriculum planning. Next, teachers need digital citizenship resources to use in their classes with their students. We added a Digital Citizenship Deep Dive section to our website so teachers could click on the topic assigned to their department - etiquette, communication and responsibility, identity and personal brand, and privacy and safety - to find articles, videos, and lesson ideas. Then teachers had 90 minutes with colleagues who taught similar classes or grade levels to brainstorm ideas for integrating digital citizenship into their existing lessons and projects.

Be warned: During these meetings, challenges will pop up. For instance, many teachers feel like they don't have enough time for their existing curriculum. Where will they fit in digital citizenship? Others might struggle to see the connection between their content area and digital citizenship, or might prefer the ease of a pre-packaged lesson. We found it helpful to talk with these teachers about how they have seen technology both and help and hinder their students' learning. Many discovered they are already teaching digital citizenship and this new integrated model would just help them do it more intentionally and with our new common vocabulary.

Step 4: Follow-up

Make sure teachers feel supported as they roll out their lessons. This could mean having a second adult in the classroom the first time students and teachers are trying something new, or providing opportunities for teachers to debrief and support each other as they work through this new curriculum.

Students need to know that it is part of a larger culture shift, and not just a one-year initiative. School leaders should remind students about the importance of digital citizenship often at team or class meetings. Teachers shouldn't be the only, or even the first, people that students hear from about digital citizenship.

Include other members of the school community. Make sure that school counselors have participated in digital citizenship education like their teacher counterparts so they are prepared to talk with parents and students. Continue offering resources, webinars, and in-person presentations for parents so they feel supported and empowered to talk to their students about when and how they are using technology.

A culture shift will happen when digital citizenship concepts and terminology are just as integral to day-to-day instruction as any other aspect of a child's education. Agree on the digital citizenship goals, share your vision, train your teachers, and follow-through by continuing to support all stakeholders.

Julie Cremin (@JulieCremin) is a Digital Learning Specialist at St. John's Prep, a 1:1 iPad school serving 1500 students in grade 6-12 in Massachusetts. Kerry Gallagher (@KerryHawk02) is a Technology Integration Specialist at the same school.

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How to Take Digital Citizenship Schoolwide During the 2016-17 School Year - EdSurge News

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Since our students are using technology to play, learn, and communicate while at home and at school, they should be learning how to use that technology responsibly. Full integration of digital citizenship (or DigCit) curriculum into every class and every content area-at every grade level-should be the goal to meet this need.

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What Makes A Good Digital Citizen? | HyperDocs.co

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The teachers using this HyperDoc will have varying skill levels and degrees of comfort integrating technology in their teaching. The tools used are reliable and straight-forward so that every teacher may experience a successful lesson. At the same time, this is a model for the way a HyperDoc can change the way teachers think about integrating technology in a 1:1 environment.

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SCOE: Resources: Instruction: Technology for Learners: Digital Citizenship Themes & Lessons

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SCOE: Resources: Instruction: Technology for Learners: Digital Citizenship Themes & Lessons

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The mission of the Sonoma County Office of Education (SCOE) is to foster student success through service to students, schools, and the community.

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Image: REUTERS/Paul Hackett

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8 digital skills we must teach our children

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K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Media

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K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Media