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The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Children's Health Education Center have partnered to create Bullyfree Basics, a program for elementary school students that transforms lessons on the dangers of spreading rumors and insulting classmates into animated, interactive games.

NETS for Teachers 2008
Unveiled June 30 at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, ISTE's revised National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers mark a significant overhaul of the group's original teacher technology standards, which ISTE introduced in 2000. The revised framework focuses on what teachers should know to help students become productive digital learners and digital citizens.

This three-part article includes a discussion of classroom connections to social networking sites and the school's role in intervening when information that affects the classroom is publicly posted on MySpace or Facebook. The authors also provide five key social networking tips:
1. Establish a policy for dealing with incidents in which students break school rules and their inappropriate behavior is showcased publicly on social-networking sites.
2. Outline clear guidelines for administrators that spell out how schools should discipline students based on information garnered from social-networking sites, and let parents and students know about those rules.
3. Educate students about online-safety issues and how to use sites such as Facebook and MySpace responsibly.
4. Have a policy in place for dealing with cyber bullying.
5. If teachers are using social-networking sites for educational purposes, they should establish clear guidelines for how they intend to communicate with students via those sites.

Very important document!! The NASSP Position Statement is the cornerstone for all of our work in cybersafety education at CTAP4. Click on "expand" to see their recommendations.

NASSP recommendations for school leaders 1. Familiarize themselves about all aspects of computer technology, including the mechanics of the Internet, blogs, social networking Web sites, and the liability issues associated with the use of these technologies 2.Form a technology team that comprises staff members, parents and students to act in an advisory capacity to the larger school community 3.Educate staff members and students on using technology within the boundaries of the law 4.Guide teachers and students on how the Internet can serve as effective educational tools 5.Formulate clear guidelines to protect students and teachers against cyber bullying and other criminal activities 6.Conduct orientation sessions for parents regarding student use of the Internet 7.Reinforce these guidelines with parents and encourage vigilance of Internet use at home, including the elimination of derogatory statements against other students or staff.

Pokemon Learning League partnered with the Virginia Department of Education to educate students with their episode entitled, Internet Safety and You. Content is open to everyone in all 50 states. Quizzes assess student knowledge and there is also an opportunity to apply principles and practices.

As tales of online cruelty mount, districts are trying a mix of prevention and punishment, incorporating internet safety into curriculum and tightening student conduct codes.Whether a pattern or merely an unfortunate streak, what's not disputed is the direction of the general drift in cyberbullying cases: upward. Once relegated to the playgrounds and back lots, the schoolyard bully now finds prey online. While the states are responding to cyberbullying by adopting legislation that mixes prevention with punishment, for school districts the issue quickly turns from educating the community about the threat of cyberbullying to crafting a response when an incident actually occurs. Districts are realizing that integrating internet safety education into curriculum isn't enough. They must also address cyberbullying in their conduct and discipline codes.

John Palfrey & Urs Gasser [Berkman Center] identify 9 myths about Digital Natives and offer succinct interpretations based on research and observations of youth. Educators involved in digital citizenship efforts may find a shift in thinking is necessary in how we educate students about issues related to online safety, copyright, privacy etc....where their confusions are and what they do/don't understand. It's also important to understand the significance of social groups and online communities on our youth and how they motivate development of friendship-driven and interest-driven content.

Temple University Media Education Lab provides this helpful document: 10 common myths about copyright and fair use for educators.

"21st Century Learning" is currently the hottest catchphrase in education, but what it means has yet to be fully determined. Technology is a part of students' everyday lives, and substantial advances in technology have profoundly affected the way they learn. As a result, educators are working hard to meet the ever-evolving needs of 21st century learners. Translating the ongoing technological revolution into a learning experience is a fundamental part of that challenge.

How tech-obsessed iKids would improve our schools. One of the strangest things in this age of young people's empowerment is how little input our students have into their own education and its future. Kids who out of school control large sums of money and have huge choices on how they spend it have almost no choices at all about how they are educated -- they are, for the most part, just herded into classrooms and told what to do and when to do it.

The Stock Market Game™ program offers a vast library of learning materials correlated to national voluntary and state educational standards in Math, Business Education, Economics, English/Language Arts, Technology, Social Studies and Family and Consumer Sciences. Students invest a hypothetical $100,000 online and use real internet research and news updates to simulate the stock market experience.

To help everyone understand fair use, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education was released today by the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at Temple University.

UC Berkeley study administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The complete findings on three years of ethnographic work [22 different case studies of youth engagement with new media] will be published in Summer 2008. The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media, rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids innovative cultures for schools and higher education, and engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. The research focuses on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after school, and in recreational settings.

This excellent video from Temple University's Digital Media Education Lab illustrates the reasons why media literacy educators are at the forefront of the user rights movement because of their reliance on the use of copyrighted materials in their teaching. We see how teachers' confusion about copyright affects the quality of teaching and learning, the ability to share innovative teaching practices, and students' understanding of the law. Download the report, "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy" for more information.

An effective school-based strategy to address the issue of online safety should include these six key components:
EDUCATIONAL USE - Schools must ensure that when students use the Internet, their activities have an educational purpose -- class assignments, extra credit work, and perhaps some high quality enrichment activities as a reward
SUPERVISION AND MONITORING Schools must shift focus from reliance on filtering to better supervision and monitoring.
MEANINGFUL CONSEQUENCES Misuse of the Internet must lead to a meaningful consequence -- but it should be recognized that suspension of Internet access privileges just causes more work for teachers. Requiring a service contribution to the school and establishing "close monitoring status" for all Internet use are preferable consequences.
ACCIDENTAL ACCESS TO PORN - All students and staff must know that if inappropriate material appears, they should quickly turn off the monitor or turn it so it can't be seen, and then report it. Following any incident or discovery, there must be a responsible assessment of culpability.
INAPPROPRIATE BLOCKING Selected staff in every school building must have the authority and ability to quickly override the filter to provide other staff or students access to sites that have been inappropriately blocked
INTERNET SAFETY AND RESPONSIBLE USE EDUCATION Schools must provide effective Web 2.0 Internet safety and responsible use education to students and parents.

Instructional and classroom materials and videos in both English and Spanish, coded for grade-level appropriateness. Train-the-trainer materials are also available. A drop-down menu provides direct links to pages customized for each state, to make it easy to form educational partnerships.

When a school or district decides to implement education technology into the curriculum, one of its overriding goals must be to create plans and policies for all members of the learning community to have equitable access and use. Appropriate funding and professional development represent the key means of supporting equitable access and use of technology to ensure technology literacy and to support meaningful learning for all students.

Kids create their own avatars and complete missions that educate them about cyberbullying, social media and mobile safety. Part of an Australian non-profit social initiative (Smart Online/SafeOnline) that uses kids to deliver campaigns aimed at educating their peers about cyberbullying/cybersafety issues. Registration is required and even though this is designed for use in Australia, anyone can play. A nice feature is that, as kids complete missions, they get an email summarizing what they have learned. This is the same agency that created the video, Pants Down

Organized around the way middle schoolers use the Internet, the CyberCitz Project provides teaching materials on Internet safety, security and ethics. This new project includes an Educators' Guide, a youth website, technology citizenship posters, and e-lessons on a K-12 learning management system. This project was produced in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Educational Technology and IIIA at James Madison University. Navigate through the curriculum content using the sidebar on the left side of the screen.

The following articles originally appeared in one of ISTE's publications: our flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology (L&L), the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, or the Journal of Research in Computing Education. This sampling of articles dealing with digital citizenship and related issues will be available to the general public for a limited time.