The school I teach at is technology rich and is looking to become more so in the future. We are a BYOD school but are hopefully going to be move closer to a 1:1 model with a check out system for students who are in need of devices. We have an online Learning Management System called Echo that teachers are expected to use on a daily basis. Google Classroom is being activated for our district. All teachers are given laptops and projectors and my site has been supportive of teachers who request additional technology such as document cameras. We have intervention classes with software components and a fully stocked computer lab. Students are given e-mail addresses via Gmail that will be theirs through the end of high school. My site is a PBL site and is becoming a PrBL site in math and my district includes 21st Century Skills in their mission. Students use technology every day. Students use shared space on the internet, such as Google Drive and other apps, every day. The need for digital citizenship training is overwhelming.
The school I teach at is a middle school and every year I have been at this school, without fail, we have had some technology related or social media related student issue. Whether it is cyber bullying via Twitter or Instagram or students bashing on teachers in Google Docs or Chat or even things as serious as sexting, students can take their tech use too far without boundaries and training. One year, a student who was in excellent academic shape and had won awards got involved in one of these technology mishaps. It will surely follow him for a long time. I have no doubt that without digital citizenship, more students will wind up like him. Fortunately, my site values digital citizenship. In sixth grade, students complete a digital citizenship project in social studies, focusing on how to use technology professionally and manage their footprints. In seventh grade Language Arts, students do an argumentative project about social media. Yet despite this, students still get into trouble each year. I do not believe there are any shortcomings to the wonderful projects at my site, but maybe students need more. Or maybe it is just a middle schooler’s nature to push boundaries until something snaps back. Either way, the course of action is clear. Students need consistent digital citizenship training in all classes and all content areas. When I reflect about digital citizenship and math, it feels difficult at first. Common Sense Media links all their activities to ELA standards, but not to math. There could be some interesting work in statistics of identity theft, but making students aware of identity theft is not necessarily digital citizenship. Teaching students how to protect themselves against identity theft is closer to digital citizenship and that is something math can help with. Every year, before even thinking about digital citizenship in my own room, I had students do a Problem Based Learning Unit on password strength and why longer and more complex passwords are so valuable. Ironically, students learned that their assigned passwords were not incredibly strong and made many of them glad they changed them. This connected well to mathematical standards on sample space and probability models and begins to get on the fringes of digital citizenship. While being safe and secure online is a foundation of digital citizenship, I believe more can be done. A second idea for integrating digital citizenship could be using Google forms to create surveys. I would prefer this to Padlet because it can export to Google Sheets while still allowing the anonymity of Padlet. Then the data can be organized and used in a structured way. Teaching students to use Sheets also increases their digital agency and 21st Century skills. Ideally, students could design their our survey questions. Perhaps questions like “How many social media accounts do you have?” to show how wide a footprint can be or “Have you ever had a negative experience on social media?” to show the prevalence of cyberbullying in their community. This could help make the issues more authentic for students by seeing data that relates to their classmates. Then they can create charts to demonstrate evidence and make mathematically supported arguments about cyberbullying or other topics that they are interested in. A third idea I have is less mathematically inclined, but still can develop useful skills. This resource from Common Sense Media, which I want to build into a lesson plan soon, does not include math, but is very similar to what my site calls a “Claim-Evidence-Reasoning” process. We do it in all subject areas to help prepare students for the CAASPP and beyond. Students need to put together a claim and research evidence to support it. The evidence they choose is justified by their reasoning. This activity has students do just that. Students need to make a claim about which host to do, find evidence for their claim, and provide reasoning to support their evidence. This activity is perhaps more intuitive to students than some math problems and can be a great way to scaffold and practice the CER process with them. This option is the least personal of the three, but i could add reflective journals to it so students can relate the problem to their own experiences. I don’t feel like any of these ideas particularly tie into digital communication directly. The third idea gets into the idea of “passive” communication where public information has an impact on your opportunities. The second idea could tie into the effects of previous communication on social media. If I needed to focus more heavily on communication and wanted to do it in a mathematical way, perhaps I could focus on infographics and how students can effectively communicate via digital products. Most students do not understand what makes an infographic effective and clear at first. While that is more niche than say, professional e-mails or social media postings, I believe that it is a part of digital literacy and impacts a student’s digital citizenship. In other words, citizenship can show up in a lot of ways. The more literate students are with different apps and forms of information sharing, the more they can participate. A student who knows how to code has different opportunities online than a student who designs graphics than a student who runs a blog. However, all those different skills can impact a student’s citizenship and I imagine that digital citizenship will only continue to expand as time moves on.
2 Comments
Nai Saelee
6/12/2017 10:42:05 am
Hi Patrick,
Reply
Nancy
6/12/2017 02:45:46 pm
Hi Patrick,
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
October 2017
Categories |