"In all of our efforts to teach students safe, appropriate, and responsible technology use, are we forgetting the more important job of teaching our students empowered use?"
A collection of links that aim to encourage a discussion in schools about the purpose of AUPs.
Some educators say the social-media bans in schools are overkill and privacy
fears have overshadowed the positive educational opportunities social media can
offer students.
It is known, too, that students also access social-networking sites and post
to them during class time via mobile phones or by circumventing the network
blocks.
''Ineffective policy is to ban use; prohibition has never worked,''
doesn't matter how impoverished a young person may be, they will have access to
social networks daily, they find ways to get online through public libraries,
internet cafes, at their friend's house or on their mobile
Common advice for teachers is to be familiar with privacy settings on
social-networking sites, perhaps maintain a private and professional account
(although this is not permitted on Facebook) and to set a search-engine alert
for their own name, so adverse mentions can be detected early and dealt with.
So can, or should, a teacher be Facebook friends with a student?
This site is comparable to the Australian cybersmart.gov.au site. It supports and is explicit in its content and could easily be embedded into any curriculum or policy where digital citizenship is being explored.
"Despite the fact that I know many teachers who would rank Twitter as the most valuable and powerful networking tool they have access to, there are still many more who simply don't "get" the value of Twitter. I've been to lots of conferences over the last few years where the enormous value of belonging to a Personal Learning Network was being touted, and Twitter is nearly always being suggested as the ideal tool for building that network. At one recent conference I asked for a show of hands for who was not yet on Twitter, and many hands went up... my response was "Why not? What are you waiting for? How many times do you need to hear people say that Twitter is the most valuable tool they have, before you actually try it for yourself?""
An interesting article that splits digital citizenship into two (citizenship and rights), not sure it is necessary but may be helpful for some. Possibly good for focusing/separating policy development into more manageable parts. Unsure.