You’ve found a great website, full of great material on a topic you love to teach your students. Here’s a great opportunity for you to send your students out onto the internet to do some research, because you know they’re going to love this website as much as you do. I mean, it’s got so much good stuff! You book the computer lab, whip out a lesson plan and a set of instructions, and set them to work. At some point, however, the problems show up. They get done too early and start to explore the other areas of the internet you’d rather they not. In the process of doing that fabulous PowerPoint presentation, they pull images off the web with stock photo embedded across the front. What you thought was great information is insufficient, so they go out and get their own research, which leaves much to be desired. That interactive commenting you expected them to do? They’re copying and pasting memes and calling each other every name in the book. What you thought would be a great lesson devolved into a typical internet experience, and now you never want them to use a computer again.
“Like a village, the K-12 professional community must develop common ground that advocates the use of technology in the classroom while preparing the student to make sound choices both for themselves and for others in the digital world” (Hollandsworth, Dowdy, and Donovan, 2011). Sound choices, indeed, and when my students reach me in the 10th and 11th grades and haven’t been instructed in how to make these choices, it makes my job that much tougher. As with everyone before me, I have a packed curriculum and little time to add units on digital citizenship. Still, what I want my students to do requires them to know and use these skills, and rather than wait on others to do the job, it falls upon me to prepare them for digital tasks. Hence my triggering question for Module 4: How can I develop and implement responsible and appropriate guidelines for my students' online class activities, including research, collaboration, and writing?
Hollandsworth, Dowdy, and Donovan state that the opportunities to be proactive in teaching digital practices include “effective digital citizenship curriculum, peer mentor programs, effective role models, educational faculty/staff awareness, enhanced awareness of the risks, and most importantly - a proactive versus reactive approach” (2011). Within my sphere of influence on that list is being an effective role model and faculty awareness, as well as a proactive approach. As an effective role model, for example, I’m doing more to cite my sources when I put together online presentations. No longer do I take a picture from a Google search and paste it into my PowerPoint; now I look at the usage rights of that picture and make sure I have permission to use it in my presentation. I cite my source, and I have established procedures (or will soon) for my students to do likewise. This course has raised my awareness of these issues, to the point that as I developed a blogging assignment for my students, I researched guidelines for having students make comments so they would be able to do so within set parameters, rather than randomly and according to whatever non-school-appropriate social guidelines they have developed for themselves.
My awareness, however, is not enough. Lindsay and Davis write, “Digital citizenship is … about transforming yourself into a professional who can effectively research technology trends, monitor the uses of technology in your school or district, avoid the fear factor that can easily paralyze you, and empower student-centered learning to create vibrant, exciting learning projects” (2010). In other words, I have to stay on top of things. As new technologies emerge, it’s up to me to understand them and understand how my students interact with them. The guidelines I develop this year may change as the technology my students use changes, and if I cannot adapt to those changes, then my students will fall behind ability to safely manage their new digital frontier.
Lindsay and Davis also point out that “testing the waters of digital citizenship can be turbulent” (2010). I’ve embarked on my student blogging experiment as just that - an experiment. I was upfront with the students about how I wasn’t sure how this would work, but we went ahead with it anyway. I’m learning as we go, adapting to the problems they’re encountering and presenting, and making changes to fill the students’ needs. I’ve already learned, for example, that my students write a lot and that I need to factor in the time necessary to provide feedback. My adaptation there is to have students form groups and provide the feedback within the group themselves. This way they’re responsible for the improvement of their fellow writers, but they also get valuable feedback for their own writing. We’ll see how they do with this part of the assignment, and whether it works or not, I’ll continue to adapt the lesson to make it work better.
The common thread in my research is the need to be proactive. Ribble and Miller write, “Educational leaders have a responsibility as protectors of students, and as such can become part of the problem, if they do not take proactive steps to begin finding solutions to cyberbullying and other technological issues” (2013). Whatever guidelines I develop, I cannot wait until they are needed. I have to develop them now, and I have to be willing to adapt them to the needs of my students. I shouldn’t wait until next year, but I should start implementing them immediately so that I’ll have a head start on what I use for next year. It won’t be easy, but my students will benefit tremendously and be that much more prepared when they leave high school for the real world.
References:
Hollandsworth, R., Dowdy, L., & Donovan, J. (2011). Digital citizenship in K-12: it takes a village. TechTrends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning, 55:4, 37-47. doi: 10.1007/s11528-011-0510-z
Lindsay, J., & Davis, V. (2010). Navigate the digital rapids. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37:6, 12-15. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=EJ886385
Ribble, M., & Miller, T. N. (2013). Educational leadership in an online world: connecting students to technology responsibly, safely, and ethically. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 17:1, 137-145. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=EJ1011379
Hi Pat,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate how you outline the problems we face as educators and then talk about solutions. It is true that we need to be proactive and seek solutions.