Standard 4.2 Safe, Healthy, Legal & Ethical UseCandidates model and facilitate the safe, healthy, legal, and ethical uses of digital information and technologies. (PSC 4.2/ISTE 5b)
|
This artifact is a blog post I wrote on the topic of online safety. This was posted to my blog during April of 2016 for ITEC 7480. The post was intended to communicate to teachers and parents some of the dangers technology can introduce and to also introduce several sources for mitigating these as well as learning ways to protect themselves and others. In order to insure safe, healthy, legal and ethical behavior from students we must model and discuss what we expect from students. The internet can seem a pretty bland and benign place to net-neophytes. The hope is that the resources provided as well as the analogy put forth in the blog will facilitate this discussion.
Standard 4.2 outlines the safe, healthy, legal, and ethical uses of digital information and technologies. The blog post seeks to promote safely and appropriate communication online settings by equating online interactions to face to face communication. In my experience it helps both students and adults alike to judge appropriate exchanges by simply asking if they would be comfortable with this interaction if the other person was standing at their front door. I also introduce several sites with rich content and lessons on digital citizenship and netiquette. This resources provided, particularly Digital Tattoo and the NearPod course should also assure success even if the teacher is not comfortable or even conversant with the topic.
Online safety is a prerequisite for online learning environments in precisely the same way that physical safety must be achieved before classroom learning can occur. I find that most inexperienced teachers tend to one extreme or the other. They are either scared of the internet and technology or they are far too comfortable. The truth is that awareness of the dangers both promotes confidence and guards against recklessness. In writing this blog, I was able to distil my thinking and combine my ideas with research on best practice. This helped me visualize better ways to conduct our digital citizenship classes as well as facilitate more teachers working with their students on online safety. In the future I would like to further expand the ideas and resources in this post with an eye towards creating a complete online class in digital citizenship aimed at the middle-schooler.
This document encouraged me to approach my teachers about their students current online behavior. This led to my being invited into several classrooms to discuss online safety. As we move more and more of our academic content online, we will need to be sure that we are raising good digital citizens. One piece of evidence to demonstrate our success has been a significant reduction in the number of discipline referrals related to online behavior and incidents of cyber-bullying. Two years ago we were experiencing a rash of these incidents and this year we have yet to have our first one. Moving forward I am training teachers to make digital citizenship a part of their curriculum. It will only be when the entire school begins making good digital citizenship an expectation that we will fully bring our school culture of inclusiveness and tolerance online into our virtual school. I plan to add digital citizenship questions to our student surveys this year and combine that data with the Georgia “safe school” survey that we give to students every year to track our improvement.
Standard 4.2 outlines the safe, healthy, legal, and ethical uses of digital information and technologies. The blog post seeks to promote safely and appropriate communication online settings by equating online interactions to face to face communication. In my experience it helps both students and adults alike to judge appropriate exchanges by simply asking if they would be comfortable with this interaction if the other person was standing at their front door. I also introduce several sites with rich content and lessons on digital citizenship and netiquette. This resources provided, particularly Digital Tattoo and the NearPod course should also assure success even if the teacher is not comfortable or even conversant with the topic.
Online safety is a prerequisite for online learning environments in precisely the same way that physical safety must be achieved before classroom learning can occur. I find that most inexperienced teachers tend to one extreme or the other. They are either scared of the internet and technology or they are far too comfortable. The truth is that awareness of the dangers both promotes confidence and guards against recklessness. In writing this blog, I was able to distil my thinking and combine my ideas with research on best practice. This helped me visualize better ways to conduct our digital citizenship classes as well as facilitate more teachers working with their students on online safety. In the future I would like to further expand the ideas and resources in this post with an eye towards creating a complete online class in digital citizenship aimed at the middle-schooler.
This document encouraged me to approach my teachers about their students current online behavior. This led to my being invited into several classrooms to discuss online safety. As we move more and more of our academic content online, we will need to be sure that we are raising good digital citizens. One piece of evidence to demonstrate our success has been a significant reduction in the number of discipline referrals related to online behavior and incidents of cyber-bullying. Two years ago we were experiencing a rash of these incidents and this year we have yet to have our first one. Moving forward I am training teachers to make digital citizenship a part of their curriculum. It will only be when the entire school begins making good digital citizenship an expectation that we will fully bring our school culture of inclusiveness and tolerance online into our virtual school. I plan to add digital citizenship questions to our student surveys this year and combine that data with the Georgia “safe school” survey that we give to students every year to track our improvement.