Digital Citizenship

For the past two years I have been co-teaching a lesson with our IT specialist about the district acceptable use of technology policy. Middle School technology TEK 5 concerns digital citizenship. It states that  students should be shown how to practice safe, responsible, legal, and ethical behavior while using technology tools and resources. After doing a sort activity, we talk about related issues: how to properly care for technology so that everyone can use it when they need to, proper network and email etiquette - what is acceptable and what isn’t. Even though they sign a copy of the agreement at the beginning of the year, many students are surprised to find out what it actual says. Students don’t realize, for example, that district email belongs to the district, and that any emails sent using that account can be accessed and read by district personnel. This is a great lesson to learn early, however, as most workplace email accounts are set up exactly the same way. As our school is pretty technology-rich, we are asked to go over this lesson with all three grade levels every year. For next year we are planning on videotaping scenarios related to the district’s idea of acceptable use. Then we can have students explain whether what was in the video was acceptable use or not, and explain the reason for the rule. I think that it is extremely important that students (especially at the secondary level) understand the why of these rules.