Doom and Gloom or Rainbows and Unicorns?

“Light side, dark side” by Frederic Spycher is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This week was the introduction to the Digital Citizenship course. We were asked to think of which side of the technology continuum we fell on - the dark side or the light side.
Although I try to incorporate technology into my class as much as possible but I don't teach digital citizenship as often as I should, I would say that I am either a dark side - beware of all the pearls of the internet! or a light side ostrich and I have my head buried in the sand and if we don't talk about the problems, they won't be there. I am hoping throughout this course to come up with some strategies to teach about the dark side while embracing the light side and minimize my ostrich!

I chose to read an article about 5 ways educators can become digital citizenship leaders.

The 5 ways listed are: 

- Model appropriate online connections 

- Support colleagues who are just getting on board with edtech

- Connect students to opportunities to model positive digital citizenship

- Get families in the game

- Embed digital citizenship in classroom norms

The idea that appropriate behaviour needs to be modelled as well as ongoing resonates with me. Although students may have quite extensive access to it, they do not intuitively know what to do with the technology. They may only know the surface features of certain products or how it immediately is useful to them.  

Getting families involved by providing ways for them to interact without committing to coming in to school will probably help with the connection and not alienate anyone who is unable to come into the school. 

I hadn’t thought about the idea that helping colleagues would increase one’s digital citizenship, but I like the idea of helping others. I have offered in school PD on GAFE as well as PowerSchool to try to make my coworkers lives easier when using these technologies. 

 Randles, J. (2018). 5 ways educators can become digital citizenship leaders. International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). June 6, 2018 https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=2131&category=Digital-citizenship&article=