Teaching an Old Dog, New Tricks
This is my 28th year in education and my 6th year in administration. I consider myself to be quite adept in a number of areas, including teaching reading strategies, using math manipulatives to teach algebra, building relationships with students and their families, coaching basketball and teaching athletes how to complete a lay-up, and having fun by celebrating Speak Like a Pirate Day, Star Wars Day, and any other silly little day that can be recognized. What I wasn’t prepared for in this class was to learn how little I know about digital literacy, digital citizenship, digital responsibility or whatever you want to call it.
After reading (Digital) Identity in a World that No Longer Exists and The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers I learned the importance of having a positive digital footprint. Well, I was always aware of this fact but never really put much thought into it other than I should be careful of making sure anything I post to social media is appropriate and won’t get me into trouble. And then after reading To Keep Teens Safe Online, They Need to Learn to Manage Risk I went down the rabbit hole and started bookmarking a plethora of websites centered around online safety. I know as a parent, when my daughter was in her formative teenage years, we never really had these conversations but now that she has her own children and the online landscape has changed tremendously since her days, so I thought it would be important to share these with her and with our families at the school where I teach.
In the process of reading over all the wonderful and useful safety tips, one that kept showing up over and over again, was making sure your social media platforms were set to private. Well duh! Who doesn’t know this? I know many of our students don’t because that’s how I gather necessary intel at times when having to investigate incidents and such but I digress. I have my Facebook privacy settings to Friends (+ friends of anyone tagged) and sleep like a baby at night knowing that not everyone has access to it. I then decided to see what my actual digital footprint looked like on the Internet so I completed a Google search on myself, only to discover that my Instagram page was public. What! How could I be so careless? Oh boy! Now, I barely use Instagram and only had nine posts up but that isn’t the point. I learned a valuable lesson here. CHECK YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS! I went into my Instagram account and after some searching, I found the area where this could be changed. They certainly don’t make it easy though.
So long story short, this weeks readings got me to thinking, our school needs to focus on teaching our students and their families about digital responsibility. If it was able to help this old dog, then certainly it will help our school community. Time to start collecting resources and bookmarking more pages!
I appreciate your candidness around your personal experiences and the dire need to help our students learn how to engage with these technologies properly. Helping educate families is a struggle, but a necessary reality.
I can’t help but wonder why our government organizations don’t mandate these companies to make it easier to change our privacy settings. Meta(Facebook, Instagram, etc) likes to hide everything in settings under different tabs.
People think these sites are free, unfortunately, we don’t pay with our wallets directly, just indirectly through the loss of our privacy and through targeted marketing.
Agreed. It is a necessary reality. What I’m struggling with is where to start exactly. I suppose Ribble’s 9 Elements is where I should start.
And ain’t that the truth! I had a heck of a time with those privacy settings. I was even second guessing myself with trying to figure out the official ChatGPT app. I’ll be blogging about it shortly.
And very true. Nothing better than Googling Lego sets and then seeing a bunch of ads on my Facebook for Lego. In this case, I also pay with my wallet.
Hey Jason! The blog looks great. Fellow Basketball coach over here. 🙂
I also googled myself and was mortified to find an old blog from my first or second year of uni. Nothing nefarious there — but very cringey. AI frightens me, but I also went as far as asking AI what it knew about me. Although my edusite is not public, it pulled up a comment I left on a peer’s public blog from a summer class 2 years ago to compose a paragraph about what kind of person I am. Apparently, I am passionate about using technology for inclusion. Not too bad. 🙂
Oh? This is intriguing. Did you use ChatGPT to find out about you? What prompt did you use? This would be a good exercise to do with staff and see what shows up. It could be risky though. It might have to be prefaced with if you find something you’re not so proud of, take the necessary steps to mitigate its presence on the world wide web. Oh boy. This might not be a good idea after all. Maybe this is a homework assignment for them to do on their own. I’ll have to ponder it some more.
I appreciate your sense of humor. It’s a good reminder that learning never stops, especially as the world keeps evolving. I’ve realized how much I’ve learned about digital behavior just by observing the ethical standards set at home. For today’s digital natives and future generations, sharing resources and having open conversations will really help everyone navigate the online world safely.
I couldn’t agree more Haneefat. You’re right. We can’t be gatekeepers of this information. We need to share ideas, resources, strategies, etc. with one another when it comes to digital literacy. As consumers of these products we need to help each other out because we know the developers certainly aren’t going to make it easy for us.
Hi Jason,
You raise some very interesting discussion here surrounding educating the 21st-century learner. Of course, as educators, we have mandated curriculum objectives that we must cover throughout the year, and it seems you raise the point of the “justice” side of education where we are preparing students for the future. In the sense that, are we doing students justice, if we as educators do not take the lead on fostering digital citizenship in our classrooms/schools?
It does seem like a slight “piling onto” our already complex and challenging job, but every little bit goes a long way. As you have stated above, even if an old dog can learn new tricks, there is much work to be done in our classrooms and schools. What do you think would be some of the first steps in leading this process for educators in their classrooms?
Thanks for the questions Brennan. To answer your first question, no, we definitely are not doing them justice. I feel like I have failed my students in this department and need to be proactive. I can’t change the past but I can make a difference now. Some of those firsts steps would be to do what I’ve been doing the last couple weeks. Exploring different websites, reading articles, and experimenting with AI. Teachers need to build some confidence in terms of their own digital literacy and if they are lacking, they need to know it’s okay, we have to start somewhere. Now that was first thought but of course being the savvy digital resident that I am, I Googled “Where to start when teaching about digital literacy”. This looks like a good place to start! Digital Literacy 101