Digital Citizenship in Schools

This comes from the Diigo in Education group. Although it is American, it has some useful questions and checklists, quotes and explanations about copyright, ethics and the law to share with students.

"If you pay attention to the mainstream news media, you can't have failed to have seen several instances of school related bullying last week in both New Zealand and Australia. Whilst pupils in Auckland and Wanganui clashed and the fights were recorded on cellphones, it was the case of Casey Heynes that went truly global due to the visual power of the recording taken by a bystander and shared online. I won't repeat the details of the case - there are links to videos below that provide viewpoints from both Casey himself and the mother of the boy doing the bullying - I want to comment on the surprisingly swift nature of how details of the fight spread."

"class.io helps teachers share course resources with students in a simple way. It integrates with Google Apps, Facebook and other web services that teachers and students use."

'Teenagers, legal risks and social networking sites' [PDF], a 109 page report by Melissa de Zwart, David Lindsay, Michael Henderson & Michael Phillips, investigates the legal risks of social networking as experienced by Victorian secondary school students, teachers and parents.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a vision for 21st century student success in the new global economy.

"Developed for Australian schools, eSmart is an easy-to-use, evidence-based and tested system to help you manage cybersafety and deal with cyberbullying and bullying."

"The Department has a clear Anti-Bullying Policy through the strategy 'Safe Schools are Effective Schools' which highlights that every student has the right to feel safe from bullying at school. All forms of bullying, whether it be physical, verbal or cyber are not tolerated at any level in Victorian government schools. As noted in the Department's Anti-Bullying Policy, all Victorian government schools must develop and implement a Student Code of Conduct. The Student Code of Conduct must now be updated to include cyber bullying. See the Department's anti-bullying Policy & Code of Conduct ."

"Internet filters in schools often compromise a teacher's ability to teach, yet at the same time are easy for tech-savvy students to get around, a parliamentary committee on cyberbullying has heard. The Federal Parliament undertook a cyber-safety committee late last week to investigate community concerns about protecting children from bullying online and the measures that could be used to prevent it, such as Internet filtering."

"The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program was developed to create awareness of intellectual property rights and foster a better understanding of the rights connected with creative content. Four units comprise the curriculum resources. Each unit consists of standalone yet complementary lesson plans that play off a creative rights scenario presented through a case study"

"Education 2.0: Social networking for your class. Diipo connects you the teacher with your students by making it easy to communicate with your class. Diipo also connects you with other educators and your class with other classes. Featuring an easy-to-use and familiar user-interface similar to Facebook and Twitter, Diipo helps students stay connected and engaged."

"This site provides k12 curriculum on digital citizenship and professional development for adults working with K12 students on digital citizenship."

Here 'Digital Citizenship' is defined as 'Using technology- Safely,Responsibly,Critically,Pro-actively to contribute to the digital society'. It provides lessons for each grade in one KLA. On the link for librarians. It has link to the 'California Model School Library Standards for Technology' which links info. literacy and digital literacy together to create a policy document for all years. This framework could be developed to demonstrate its application across the KLAs.

A study into parents' need for cybersafety information, including what topics they would like more information on, and the format that they would like to receive it in. The study is based on research undertaken by the ACMA in 2009. Research consisted of a brief qualitative phase, followed by a national telephone survey of 600 parents of children in the 4 to 17 age range.

This site was posted on the Diigo Education Group. It has practical ideas on how to teach and assess "in ways which make plagiarism unthinkable" (MacDonald Ross, 2008).

Always model responsible digital citizenship - your students will do the same.

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work-in the web browser itself.

Sesame Workshop and The Joan Ganz Cooney Center today released the report Always Connected which examines the media usage patterns of young children. Findings include: * Nearly 80 percent of young children (ages 0 to 5) use the internet at least once a week and just under half of all 6-year-olds play video games. * Almost nine out of ten children over age 5 are TV viewers -- at least three hours daily. * A gap remains in access to technologies, especially among low income and ethnic minority children and also notable differences in usage.

"The internet is the "greatest spying machine the world has ever seen" and is not a technology that necessarily favours the freedom of speech, the WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, has claimed in a rare public appearance. Assange acknowledged that the web could allow greater government transparency and better co-operation between activists, but said it gave authorities their best ever opportunity to monitor and catch dissidents."

"ALMOST one in five South Australian teens has met in person a stranger they befriended on Facebook. The alarming results of the Teenspeak survey of 500 13- to 17-year-olds found 18 per cent had come face-to-face with a stranger they first came into contact with on the social networking site. Teenspeak researcher Dr Mubarak Rahamathulla from Flinders University's was shocked by the findings. He warned many young people believed they were invincible."