Hi,
This course has really made me reflect on the stage that primary school children are at with regards to technology. In conversations I have had with my class over the past few weeks I have found that although they maybe digital natives with regard to their comfort when using technology their knowledge of internet safety, privacy and fair use still needs to be developed. I feel it has always been the responsibility of teachers, school administrators and parents to ensure that children are guided effectively to ensure that they can develop to become good citizens and that this now must extend into the digital world. This article from the Atlantic really made it clear the gaps between what we think technology is like for children today and where they are actually at. We need to ensure that children are not only comfortable with using the technology but that they are getting the maximum benefit out of it and using it to scaffold their learning of both academic knowledge as well as social and life skills. I found this Edutopia article by Marilyn Price Mitchell on creating a culture of integrity to be a great motivator for what i want to achieve with the children in my classroom or at least start them on this journey. Wouldn’t schools and society be a better place if everybody followed the 8 pathways to sucess and showed empathy, creativity, curiosity, sociability, resourcefulness, integrity, self-awareness and resilience both on and off line.
Image credit: Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD
In the classroom
When looking at this infographic on digital citizenship and discussing it in the classroom it is clear that some children are aware of the negative impact technology can have. The LO. for the lesson was- Identify ways to be a good digital citizen. We started with a discussion about what they think this means and the responses were roughly based on “don’t say means things” “don’t bully” “strangers can get your address and come and find you”, “hackers can get your password and steal your stuff”. They almost seemed confused when I started focusing on the positive impact the internet can have. It seemed like this was a message that nobody had said to them before which was worrying. As a result I challenged them to create their own versions of acceptable use policy for using technology in schools but they were not allowed to use negative words. This was a difficult challenge for some of them to grasp and the first suggested example was “the opposite of do cyber bully”. After we discussed how we could change “Don’t cyber bully” into a positve phrase such as “Be nice”. Then we looked at our digital citizenship infographic and focused on how we should include rules that will help with our learning. This led to examples such as “A good student will use their own words when researching” and “A hardworking student will use Edmodo frequently by posting and commenting”.
Some of the examples have shown that the children were learning how to be good digital citizens and were simplifying the information from the infographic and our discussions into simple rules. It was interesting to note that in the majority of examples there was little or no mention of copying or taking ideas from the internet without giving credit to where they got them. This is something i will have to focus on in the next few weeks. I leave you with Carlos’ (age 10) 11 words on how to be a good digital citizen
Be nice, be appropriate, use it wisely, help people, learn something