MY LEARNING SPACE: Digital Citizenship

DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP

What are some common digital citizenship issues in collaborative projects?

Using an educational network for connected teaching and learning can be scary, the issues shown on the video are only some of what makes networking so complicated. Digital Citizenship issues are bound to create controversy and complications.

Luckily for us teachers this is not new and is has been discussed and analyzed by experts, there are standards that must be followed in order to be able to use and promote technology in education.

The ISTE Standards for Digital Citizenship: Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. Students:

advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology.
exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity.
demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning.
exhibit leadership for digital citizenship.

With this in mind, there are certain areas of awareness that must be taken into account before embarking into a digital project:

They are all interrelated and equally important, students must be able to use tools efficiently, present your self properly, interact and behave socially, respect diversity, have a good understanding of geographical differences. All of these must be taken into account simultaneously and it doesn’t necessarily come naturally to students, it has to be learned.

There are many effective ways to teach it one great example is The Digital Citizenship Project created by Claire Amos to teach students about how to interact on line, it is worth reading.

Each of the areas of awareness have to be approached with caution for safety and legal reasons, it is important to be familiar with the concepts related to the following issues:

And that isn’t all, etiquette and respect is something that teachers and students must be reminded of when working in such projects, that is probably one of the hardest things for students to abide by, since they feel protected when interaction is not direct.

We as teachers need to be 100% committed to digital citizenship, because we know well that students learn from example. Also, potential problems must be foreseen and the community must be prepared to deal with promptly.