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This year, in conjunction with October's Connected Educator Month, Common Sense Media is hosting Digital Citizenship Week from Oct. 21-25. Throughout the week, there will be a webinars and other ways for schools and educators to get involved. But really, now is the perfect time to discuss digital responsibility, safety and citizenship with students, and there are plenty of valuable events and resources that you can use. Here are six of my favorite:

"When I think of Professional Development for teachers in the traditional sense, I am more and more convinced that being connected as an educator is more effective in accomplishing the goal of professionally developing. The biggest roadblock to teachers connecting may very well be the way teachers have been programmed throughout their entire education and career."

"This isn't just for people with traditional careers and family lives. It applies to all families regardless of how busy your schedule or important your job, In her book "The Obamas," author Jodi Kanter highlights the President's commitment to having dinner with his family five times a week. Unfortunately in the hustle and bustle of today's digital world, the art of the family dinner has been drained out of many homes with device interaction replacing face-to-face connection. During a panel discussion hosted by Common Sense Media that focused on raising caring kids in a digital world, Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education shared that many families are not even sure what to do at dinner time if all are free of digital devices. If this applies to your family, don't despair. Below are ideas for dinner time activities for each day of the week. These suggestions should serve as a helpful way to ensure dinner time is a valuable experience for families."

"n art school, Phil Hansen developed an unruly tremor in his hand that kept him from creating the pointillist drawings he loved. Hansen was devastated, floating without a sense of purpose. Until a neurologist made a simple suggestion: embrace this limitation ... and transcend it. "

"Perhaps the most important effect of the new economy of information is the need to make sense of information that is around us. "In order to do this, students need to literally create their learning and demonstrate not just what they know, but what they can do."

"Netiquette ( net + etiquette) is the code of proper conduct applied to virtual online spaces. This code is dictated by common sense rules ( manners ) and social conventions. Teaching students about netiquette is just as important as teaching them to use technology in their learning. Crafting a netiquette memo for your class and informing your students about the importance of these rules will definitely help you create an engaging, respectful, and meaningful learning environment where collaboration and diversity of opinions are celebrated."

"There has been plenty of hand-wringing in recent years about the "overscheduled child." With after-school hours increasingly dominated by piano lessons, soccer practice, and countless other planned activities, many of us have a nagging sense that kids are missing out on something important if they have no time for unstructured play. New research from Germany suggests these fears are justified. It finds people who recall having plenty of free time during childhood enjoy high levels of social success as adults."

"George Takei knows how to tell a great story. In this case, a true story of his life. The famed Star Trek actor, activist, and social media star was in town recently to give a remarkable talk as part of a very special TEDxKyoto event. I was invited to watch the rehearsal just before the live event, so I arrived early and grabbed a front row seat. George did not give a speech in the traditional sense. There was no lectern, no notes, no teleprompter. George obviously was reciting the speech from memory-his live version was exactly the same as in the rehearsal-but the speech did not seem memorized. That is, when I was listening I was not aware that he was giving a speech or a prepared talk, I was just lost in the narrative flow of his story."

"The following infographic from dailygenius.com makes sense, then, in that context of being able to sketch out what might be required of a digitally-savvy and competent teacher. (You can give dailygenius a follow on twitter as well.) 7 Characteristics Of A Digitally Competent Teacher"

"When we think of digital literacy, we usually think of research-finding, evaluating, and properly crediting digital sources. The "research" connotation makes sense, as it is the sheer volume of sources and media forms on the "internet" that stand out. But we are living in a world where the internet is disappearing, replaced by sheer connectivity. Are you "on the internet" when you tweet? Skim through a social reader like Flipboard? Send a text? Mark up a pdf and sync it with the cloud so you can access it later? Are the cloud and the "internet" the same thing? As the internet dissolves into something more seamless-that no longer requires a clunky web browser to make itself visible-we might adjust our perspectives in parallel."

"Last month, the Institute of Play released a 160-page whitepaper on successfully designing and implementing video games as classroom assessment tools. It is widely hoped that the Institute's study, along with further research by SRI, will prove conclusively that cognitive skills are significantly improved by playing educational video games. This was not news to the math education community, which has known about the benefits of games in the classroom for a long time. Back in 2004, a study by Tisa Lach and Lynae Sakshaug had already shown that middle school students made significant improvements in algebraic reasoning, spatial sense, and problem-solving abilities after playing biweekly sessions of popular tabletop games such as Connect Four, Mastermind, Rush Hour, and Guess Who. "

"Assessing background knowledge is an often misunderstood idea, and subsequently fumbled as a process. Background knowledge is a product of the experiences-academic and otherwise-that a student brings to a lesson. These provide both knowledge in terms of content, as well as schema in terms of analogs students can use to make sense of new ideas."

"Hi everyone, I have been looking at the future of play for about 5 years and have spoken about the topic at MIT and written about it in Fast Co. Design, Parents Magazine and The Atlantic. Recently, I summed up the research into a poster for parents and teachers to help them frame the value of play in education (see below attachment). I think this excerpt from my Atlantic article said it best, "Someday, rather than measuring memorization as an indicator of progress, we will measure our children's ability to manipulate (deconstruct and hack), morph (think flexibly and be tolerant of change), and move (think "with their hands" and play productively). Standardized aptitude tests will be replaced by our abilities to see (observe and imagine), sense (have empathy and intrinsic motivation), and stretch (think abstractly and systemically). We will advance our abilities to collaborate and create." The future favors the flexible. And that's another reason this poster has + signs at the top of each category - because the superpowers of play we will need for a constantly evolving world is always changing and it encourages everyone to add their own powers of play. I look forward to your thoughts and comments. Laura http://www.lauraseargeantrichardson.com LinkedIn: laurasgt "

"All of us have had major classroom disruptions that try our patience and push our limits. These incidents can threaten our sense of control and generate fear of looking weak to other students. We fear that other students might do the same thing if we don't take a strong stance. Couple these feelings with the possibility of taking the disruption personally, and we have a recipe for disaster. It's important that we divide our response into two parts: Immediate stabilization Intervention to resolve these issues"

"When we use literature circles, small groups of student gather for an in-depth discussion of a literary work. To ensure that students have a clear sense of direction and remain focused, each group member is given a specific task. For example, one student may be the designated artist; s/he is responsible for using some form of art to explore a main idea, a theme, or significant scene from the text. Another group member, the wordsmith, might be responsible for documenting important, unusual, or difficult words from the reading. Regardless of each student's role, each group must collaborate as they read, discuss and critically engage with texts."

"My Incredible Body is an iPad app (currently free) designed to help students learn how the human body works. The app features eight sections. Those sections are circulation, muscles, senses (vision, smell, hearing, touch), kidneys & urine, skeleton, respiration, digestion, and brain & nerves. Each section of the app contains short animated videos that explain the functions of each system and how it works."

"So when we saw the very useful teachbytes graphic above making some noise on pinterest on several different popular #edtech websites, it reminded us of the constant demands changing technologies place on existing ways we do business. When and in what contexts it makes sense to cite social media content is probably a more relevant post than sharing a graphic that simply shows the format, but they're both nice to have, yes?"

"A number of reasons commonly given for lecturing and claims commonly made for the efficiency of lecturers are examined for their basis in empirical evidence and common sense. Most of these claims are found to be somewhat weak. It appears that lecturing takes place rather more often than can be reasonably justified. The real reasons for the popularity of lecturing amongst lecturers are then examined. Of the twenty reasons for lecturing examined here, the first nine have little substance and the last eleven are avoidable."