NECC 2009 - Washington DC - Session One - Wednesday Morning - Digital Citizenship: Tools, Resources, and Best Practices

Digital Citizenship

Vicki Davis, Teacher, Coolcatteacher.com
Anne Bubvic, K12 Educator
Julie Lindsay

Digital citizenship education and issues are difficult to "teach" children because of the transitory, emerging nature of many of the issues. Explore the tools and strategies used in a global collaborative project, Digiteen (www.digiteen.net), used to teach digital citizenship to middle and early high school students. Additionally, learn how these students are empowered to develop and deliver compelling digital citizenship education to elementary and middle grade students in a compelling, hands-on digital citizenship action project.

Participants will explore the project, join a Diigo group for Digital Citizenship (http://groups.diigo.com/groups/Ad4dcss), harness the power of a digital RSS reader, learn how to share and locate digital citizenship educational tools (http://www.netvibes.com/coolcatteacher#Ad4dcss) and create digital portals of information for parents, teachers, and others.

Outline (for BYOL)

I. Backchannel and Introduction - (We will maintain a backchannel for this session to answer questions and facilitate discussion among those who are more advanced as introductory material is covered.)

II. Digital Citizenship Education.
A. Overview of tools and projects in use
B. Grassroots Movement of Teachers to connect and how to connect with others (http://www.netvibes.com/coolcatteacher#Ad4dcss)
C. Staying current (important resources to add to your RSS reader)
D. Diigo bookmark sharing group

III. Digiteen
A. Project Overview and Links
i. Digiteen Ning (http://ning.digiteen.net)
ii. Digiteen Wiki (http://wiki.digiteen.net)
iii.Digiteen Bookmarking Group (http://diigo.digiteen.net)
B. Strategies and Tools for Facilitating Student-led mentorship and education programs.
C. Case studies and methods

IV. Digital Citizenship Best Practice
A. Overview of 9 aspects of Digital Citizenship and issues for each along with resources.
B. Examples of digital citizenship education courses.

Supporting Research

The work in Digiteen has been based upon the ISTE book by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey, Digital Citizenship in schools. Additionally, ISTE nets standards require that digital citizenship is an essential aspect of student awareness, practice, and learning as it relates to technology.

Digital Citizenship is an issue that is vitally important as educators work with Acceptable Use Policies as discussed in Edutopia's recent article on appropriate behaviors - http://www.edutopia.org/netiquette-guidelines.
Additionally, as character education programs become updated for the digital age, many schools are seeing and predicting a renewed effort to help children understand appropriate online behaviors (see Edutopia's recent article on Character Education - http://www.edutopia.org/whats-next-2008-character-education).

Many online safety programs such as iSafe are creating student mentorship programs to facilitate effective teaching of younger students about online safety. See (http://www.isafe.org/channels/sub.php?ch=op&sub_id=3).

Peer mentorship, global collaboration, and participative projects that focus on digital citizenship bring together many of the trends in education include bringing character education online. TEachers need practical ways in order to do this.

Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay are co-creators of the Digiteen project (http://www.digiteen.net) and other award winning global collaborative projects and considered leaders in project based learning due to their extensive citations in Reinventing Project Based Learning by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss, published by ISTE. This is their project based approach to teaching digital citizenship. Anne Bubnic is part of the team that created the award-winning CTAP IV Cybersafety Project and the CTAP IV Middle School Math Project. All three presenters are co-founders and administrators of the grassroots effort of teachers, Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety and Success (http://ad4dcss.wikispaces.com.)