Thing # 11 Digital Citizenship

As an educator working in a community whose parents and students believe (literally) in witches, goblins, the chupacabra and the evil eye, certain aspects of digital citizenship are more important to me than others.

The articles and sites stress a huge lack of students being able to discriminate and judge sources of information on the internet. Tell me about it. My kids believe EVERYTHING they read and see. I was ready to hang my head and cry the day I was doing the thing on the Northwest tree octopus and I just took it on and on and on, and no one caught on that it was a fake. No one. I finally had to come clean. I am still wondering if they understood …

I was especially struck by the comment that the library “sanitizes” everything, and anything they read and hear in here, including of course the internet, has to be right … maybe that’s why they just couldn’t get the tree octopus thing. Isn’t the librarian always reliable and truthful?

As to a lesson on digital citizenship, I would include the following points / ideas

The internet is much more than Facebook and E-mail. But to use it as a valid source of information requires thinking and effort. That’s hard. Most people don’t like hard stuff.

Safety is paramount. At Halloween, I used to show students a picture on the internet of Ted Bundy, the serial killer. I would ask them to guess what he did for a living. They invariably came up with things like teacher, doctor, lawyer …I used his image to stress that people were not always what they seemed to be.

Bullying would be a big thing in our school. It goes on here, especially up in the middle schools. E-mails and internet social networks make it too easy since they are just typing their ugly little comments on a screen and saying things they would never have the courage to say to someone’s face. Internet social networks also lend themselves to impulsive statements. I even see it go on with teachers who fire off inflammatory e-mails to one another without thinking of the consequences. If they had to meet face to face and settle their differences, they would never make such statements as they would in an e-mail.

If you want to work and exist in this world, you have to by cyber savvy in many areas: word processing, texting, messaging as basics, and then for the higher paying positions, expertise is mandatory in all the areas.

Showing self -respect and respect for others is paramount. Use good internet manners in all cases. Don’t post gross stuff or tasteless pictures of yourself. What’s hilarious to a fourteen year old might cost them a job offer when they are eighteen.