Friday, February 22, 2013

Digital Citizenship

Jacqui Murray, whose wonderful blog, Ask a Teacher is a fabulous resource, asked us to share our thoughts on teaching Digital Citizenship on the Elementary Tech Teachers' ning. I am reposting my own response here.

With Kindergarten, I used Faux Paw and Hector's World.
For First Grade I used Router's Birthday Surprise at Netsmartz.
In Second Grade, I used Internet Safety, which is one of Brain Pop Jr.'s free videos.
Third Grade used Surf Swell Island (I like the fact that it includes Netiquette as well as Internet Safety), PBS Kids' Web License, and Garfield CyberbullyingI also introduced the concept of plagiarism when we did research. One of my kids told me about an episode of Arthur they had watched called Francine's Pilfered Paper. This is available for $1.99 on iTunes.
For Fourth Grade, I like Cyber Cafe because it covers some social networking.
We also made sure to site sources when we  did research for our state PowerPoints. As part of that project, we downloaded music from Soundzabound and discussed the fact that we were free to use this royalty free music because we had a subscription to the site.
I began my Fifth Grade lesson with the Talent Show video on Cyberbullying. I gave no introduction before the video but we had a long discussion afterwards. We watched the Brain Pop Cyberbullying video. They have a number of other Digital Citizenship videos, some of which are free. I had students take turns reading the ABC's of Cyberbullying.I also used The Way Back Machine and showed the Fifth Graders a 2001 version (It was all on one page back then!) of my website to illustrate that things on the Internet never really go away. I told them the (true) story of the young woman who posted a picture of herself as a drunken pirate on My Space and consequently was unable to graduate with a teaching degree as a result. Several students in the class generally had parents who used Facebook when doing background checks for prospective employees, so this was a good discussion about using discretion when posting. 
Again, they were required to cite their sources when they found information for our 13 Colonies HTML project. I felt very proud of my students one day that I did an online dictionary project copying and pasting definitions for a crossword puzzle and one of them reminded me that we needed to cite our source!
All grades used the Netsmartz games when they finished.

1 comment: