Digital Citizenship in Schools

Google touts its new social network as having better privacy controls than others, yet as Audrey Watters reports, they could be doing more. 

"Every day, you see how cyberbullying hurts students, disrupts classrooms, and impacts your school's culture. So how should you handle it? What are the right things to do and say? What can you do today that will help your students avoid this pitfall of our digital world? We created this free toolkit to help you take on those questions and take an effective stand against cyberbullying. So start here. Use it now. Rely on it to start your year off right. "

"The new game, called 'Stop That Post', "teaches kids why it is important not to reveal personal information on the Internet. The focus of the new game involves players racing to stop their friends and family members from posting embarrassing information and images online," according to the game's press release."

Great resource for Teaching and Modeling Good Digital Citizenship

Useful blog re net safety

This is a federal government site with information about cyber safety and digital citizenship.

Updating the searches on 21CIF New ones. 

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"With the Research and Information Fluency lessons in our highly acclaimed free CyberSmart! Student Curriculum, our goal is to actively engage students in making good search decisions and in evaluating the resources they encounter online."

Your students may be able to update their Facebook status in a heartbeat, but can they also write a thoughtful letter to the editor, voice their opinion on a call-in radio show, or access local media to advocate for community action? How well would parents or teachers in your community do at those tasks? In Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, media literacy expert Renee Hobbs makes a strong case for deepening digital literacy -- not only for youth but for Americans of all ages. Improving our digital and media literacy will require nothing less than a national community education effort, Hobbs argues in a position paper recently published by the Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation. Sorting through the flood of information most of us encounter daily requires new knowledge and critical-thinking skills, she says.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project finds that 80 percent of internet users participate in some kind of voluntary group or organization, compared to just 56 percent of non-internet users. And if you use social media, the percentages are even higher: 85 percent of Twitter users, for example, are group participants.

Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world's books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in the digital deluge are more numerous and sophisticated. The total amount of information created on the world's electronic devices is expected to surpass the zettabyte mark this year (a barely conceivable 1 with 21 zeroes after it).

The Living Sky School Division in Canada