Digital Citizenship in Schools

The idea for this page is to build a 'best of the web' reading / watching list for school leadership regarding using social media for school advancement. Rather than talk about how great social media is we're using social media to build this reading list.

"More than 5 million online U.S. households experienced some type of abuse on Facebook in the past year, including virus infections, identity theft, and for a million children, bullying, a Consumer Reports survey shows. And consumers are at risk in myriad other ways, according to our national State of the Net survey of 2,089 online households conducted earlier this year by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. Here are the details: "

"SOME 7.5 million of the 20 million minors who used Facebook in the past year were younger than 13, and a million of them were bullied, harassed or threatened on the site, a study released yesterday said. More than five million Facebook users were 10 years old or younger, and they were allowed to use Facebook largely without parental supervision, leaving them vulnerable to threats ranging from malware to identity theft to sexual predators, the State of the Net survey by Consumer Reports said."

"We're excited to announce the Grand Prize of the 2011 What's Your Story? Internet safety video contest!"

"Companies who want to know more about prospective employees can learn a lot by checking their Facebook profiles, according to a new study. Jennifer Golbeck and colleagues at the University of Maryland surveyed the public profiles of nearly 300 Facebook users for information about their favourite activities, TV shows, movies, music, books, quotes, and membership in political or other organisations. They also looked at the "About Me" and "blurb" sections. The work did not include status updates or other data that is only available to users' online friends."

Great roundup

"In the fall, Alice Marwick and I went into the field to understand teens' privacy attitudes and practices. We've blogged some of our thinking since then but we're currently working on turning our thinking into a full-length article. We are lucky enough to be able to workshop our ideas at an upcoming scholarly meeting (PLSC), but we also wanted to share our work-in-progress with the public since we both know that there are all sorts of folks out there who have a lot of knowledge about this domain but with whom we don't have the privilege of regularly interacting."

Check out the additional resources linked here.

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education helps educators gain confidence about their rights to use copyrighted materials in developing students' critical thinking and communication skills.

"ABC Pool is a social media site where you can share and engage with creative work and collaborate with the people who make it. It's a place to upload images, text, audio, and video. Anyone, any age, anywhere can contribute to Pool. Pool is run by the Australian public broadcaster and has a number of projects to which you can contribute independently or co-create with others. It's a place to meet collaborators, and Creative Commons licensing provides a way to share your work in a safe legal framework. All Pool members are asked to follow the guidelines and to report inappropriate items or comments."

"The potential for danger increases when Twitter squatters go to great lengths - often through the use (and abuse) of legitimate images or biographical material - to look and sound like the real thing. The good news for most average Joes is that Twitter squatters are more likely to have big corporations and celebrities in their crosshairs."

A useful set of resources on Social Media Policy

K-12 Wiki: Social Networking Acceptable Use

Scrible is a new service offering a nice set of tools for highlighting, annotating, and bookmarking webpages. Scribble offers browser bookmarklets for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. With the Scrible bookmarklet installed, anytime you're on a page just click the bookmarklet to launch a menu of bookmarking tools. The Scrible tool set includes highlighters, sticky notes, and font change tools. When you annotate and bookmark a page in Scrible it is saved as it appeared to you when you were done altering it.

"With all of this comes new risks and new benefits to consider - such as a new social etiquette within social media, and potential privacy issues as we store more information off local machines and onto the so-called "cloud"."

"At the same time, numerous well-meaning nonprofits appeared, seeking to help educators communicate with parents and students, but still through a lens of fear and protection. Many experts now believe this was very much the wrong approach. "We missed the boat by concentrating on internet predators," says Patti Agatston, a nationally recognized counselor and cofounder of Cyberbullyhelp.com. Larry Magid, codirector of ConnectSafely.org, concurs that "predation is statistically so unlikely that it's not where we should be putting our resources." "

"Plagiarism is nothing new. Students have been plagiarizing far before the Internet was widely available - whether it was copying from the encyclopedia or hiring professionals. But the Internet and the explosion of online resources has made it easier for students to get to those resources. You'll find a number of websites geared specifically to cheating - sites where you can buy papers, for example. But even if students opt not to pay-to-cheat, the Internet does seem to make it easier to lift content. It's as easy as copy-and-paste."

There is nothing here that is not covered by the new NSW DET social media guidelines but articles like this are a reminder that digital citizenship is not just for students.

I think that we'd all agree with these eight points, especially those regarding time. There is definitely a role for the teacher librarian in facilitating these strategies.