Today technology is used in our everyday life. The digital world and our real world are not longer separate entities. They are connected. Because of the close connection to the digital world, we need to learn about how to use the digital world in a responsible way. This is better known as digital citizenship.

As technology becomes more and more accessible, children are younger and younger when they begin to have access to the digital world. Some are just 9 or 10 when they have their first social media account and phones. How could someone that young understand how the internet works or that not everyone on the internet is a friend or is who they say they are. It is the responsibility of not only the parents, but also teachers to teach these kids digital citizenship. In Saskatchewan, digital citizenship is actually apart of the curriculum, and it has outcomes for kindergarten to grade 12.

Within digital citizenship, there are 9 elements of citizenship created by Mike Ribble. These elements founded the basis of digital citizenship and the curriculum is based upon them as well. Page 14 of the Saskatchewan digital citizenship curriculum has a brief overview of each of the 9 elements.

I chose 3 of the 9 elements to explore how I could implement the curriculum in my classroom.

DIGITAL ETIQUITTE

Is this an appropriate time and use of technology?

Within this category, I would examine the appropriate and inappropraite times to be connected with the digital world. Examples of this may include the idea of the “funeral selfie” and showing that that is not an appropriate time to be using technology. In addition to understanding the appropriate time, we also have to look at the appropriate things to be posting. With this idea comes the talk about cyberbullying and its real world effects. When discussing this the connection between Amanda Todd and her case would be a great real world example. It not only shows the effects of cyberbullying, but also how something that happens online doesn’t online affect you online, but in real life as well. (bullying in person, depression, etc).

DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

What is the policy on students using their personal devices?

For this it would depend on what the school’s policy is. For myself, I would ask that phones be put away during class in order to allow for students to focus on their work. In addition to focus, one huge advantage of keeping phones away during class is that we learn to self-monitor our usage of our device. We become less addicted to our devices which is great for our health. Now there could be exceptions for this rule. If a student talks to me about their situation, saying they need to be checking their phones (family emergencies, regulating medication) then they would be given permission to use their phones.

In my school, we had about 25-30 students from grades 9-12. Because of the small size we had split grades and the teachers came to our classrooms instead of us moving rooms. We were allowed to have our phones in some of our teachers classes and not in others. The policy was solely up to which teacher was coming in. In my grade 12 year, there was a cyberbullying issue in the grades below and our policy changed. there phone holders were installed at the teachers desk at the front of the room. Phones were to be put in those pockets during school time. we could grab them during breaks and lunch, and we could be given special permission to use them, but it became much more strict. Honestly for a lot of people I think it was a good thing. Sure everyone was mad at first, but we all learned that we didn’t absolutely need our phones all the time.

In my opinion, this is one of the most important things someone can learn. The importance of understanding how to protect your information needs to be taught. Never sharing passwords, and making sure your passwords are different and complex for each site (especially ones where you have important personal information). It is possible for your accounts to get hacked and your identify stolen, so a complex password is the basic start to protecting yourself. With this also comes with understanding that everything you post will stay on the internet, even if you think it disappears. Topics like these would be discussed in order to help students protect their personal information.

Technology has revolutionized the world. We are able to connect with people across the world with the click of a button. We can watch videos and read blogs from people anywhere in the world. This created the idea of global participation. As Michael Wesch says in An Anthropological introduction to YouTube, YouTube created a participatory culture across the world. His talk showed how one video can become viral and allow for participation of remaking and sharing remixes of the video. This participation is a type of appreciation for the content that someone else made. This content could have come from anywhere. We see this culture all over the internet on various social media site, not just YouTube. With the creation of apps like Instagram, Facebook, and especially Tik Tok, trends are blowing up and being remade over and over again. Not only that, but the video can even turn into more than just the original trend. It evolves into more. For example, a video on Tik Tok went viral about a broom being able to stand on its own. This video had an audio that said something along the lines of “Nasa says this is the only day that the gravitational pull of the Earth allows for a broom to stand like this”. Now although the audio was not telling the truth, there were so many remakes and videos trials of standing a broom up. The video below shows a few videos that were remade during this time. Even celebrities get in on the trends, making the trend blow up even more. There were so many that I remember my friends sending me them saying “OMG this is so crazy”. With these remakes, we also see a combination of different trends. In the video below at 2:52, we see the “someone like you” trend from a few months earlier combining with this trend. This just shows how something can go completely viral and cause participation by others around the world.

Another example of a current trend is the game called Among Us. There are videos and memes about this game. I didn’t understand them until I gave in and downloaded the game. It was actually pretty fun and I could finally understand the memes that were all over my social media. One thing about the internet is the trends change so fast. If you miss something or are out of the loop, you may not understand exactly what the entire internet is talking about. This happened with me and Among Us. I didn’t understand what the memes and videos meant until I played the game. If you don’t know what Among Us is, or have not seen any memes about it, take a look at this website. It gives some context as to what the game is and shows some of the memes I have seen.

Technology is a very important tool for schools. It makes research quick, taking notes easy (documents), you can share projects, make videos and posters, and do so much more. Things like this can be incorporated into the classroom to elevate the learning process of students. Technology is even more important in our current situation. All of my classes are over zoom and delivered digitally. This would not have been possible without the use of technology. In today’s classroom, using technology is super important. Not only does this teach kids how to use it, but also how to keep up with the ever changing systems.

When I was in school, we got Smart Boards around my grade 3 year. It was so exciting, but no one really knew how to use them yet. Now, some teachers use it as a glorified chalkboard, but others are way more creative. Technology can be used for things that are not necessarily accessible in your school. For example, my Health Science class did an online urine analysis lab, we did online tours of historical sites in history, and planned an entire trip to Egypt in French. This is a great way to incorporate technology into the class.

Participation in trends that the students know can also be a good way to gain classroom participation or classroom morale. For example, we could use the broom challenge. Before the students come in you could stand up some brooms. It is a way for the teacher to connect with the students outside life. Using my other example of Among Us, there could be a recess game that comes out of the app, or even a teamwork skills activity to find out who the imposter is. You just need to be creative and participate in the trends.

One thing we need to be careful of is becoming too dependent on the technology. Seeing students be told “all your notes and homework is on Google classrooms” and having them just work through it with no student-student or student-teacher interaction while they are all in one classroom is sad. To me this is not good. The classroom is an interactive space, if the student wanted to do all the work online, why not take an online class. In the same way, a lot of our technology will not work without power. In my school there were multiple times where the power would go off for at least 3 hours. This caused us to not be able to do anything for classes except math and English (where we had assignments and reading to do). Becoming too dependent on the technology is just as bad as using no technology at all. As teachers we need to be able to find the balance between the 2 and use the technology to elevate our teaching and make learning easier for our students.

When it comes to Twitter, I did not really know much about it before this class. I never really thought of it as a tool for learning until EDTC 300. I really just thought it was a place for people to update with information. I am really starting to see the value in sharing resources via twitter. For one it always stores your tweets so you can always revisit the resource you have shared. Not only that, but you can so easily connect with other teachers and classmates and share with each other. By retweeting the resources others are sharing, you can also go back and find that resource later on.

One way to build a Twitter following and find great people to follow is by participating in events like Sask edchat. On Sept. 30, I participated, along with my fellow classmates, in a live Twitter chat called Sask edchat. It was a really interesting experience. For one, I got to share my opinion on topics and suggest ideas to fellow students and teachers. I also got some great ideas about growing my PLN (personal learning network) from my fellow “chatters” who have all had more time to develop their own PLNs. I got to connect and find many educators to follow, not only from Saskatchewan, but from around Canada and the US. it was so fun to chat with people who have the same interests and make those connections. It was hard to keep up with how many tweets were coming in, but I did my best to read as many as I could. Obviously, I was unable to read all of them, but my fellow classmates retweeted some that I did not have time to read. This allowed me to read them on my feed after the fact.

I am not too sure how Twitter can be incorporated into the school setting besides as a place to share information with parents about what students are doing (given that they have media releases). Maybe to update parents and students about information and reminders. Like “this class has a test in math tomorrow”, or something along those lines. I feel like there are better ways to give these updates instead of on a social media app. On Twitter, it is more than just the students and parents can view these reminders, so it is not necessarily the best place for them. I could maybe see it being used as a tool for question and answers, kind of like what we did for Sask edchat, Again, I feel that there are better platforms for that type of discussion with students. If there was a topic students are learning about in school, joining a live chat even just to read the tweets might be a good way to gain a deeper understanding of the topic.

Feedly is a really great resource for finding articles and posts related to specific topics. It is a website that allows me to follow other websites and blogs, and have easy access to their content. They also make it super easy to share resources with others.

At first I wasn’t sure about which blogs to follow. I started by searching with keywords like EDTC, edtech, edchat, ed resources, and other common educational hashtags. From there I would look at the website and take a look at the type of articles that they put out and the topics that they are on. In addition, I was browsing through twitter and saw posts from some of my classmates that had really good articles, that were from blogs that I did not yet follow. So, I would search Feedly for the blog and then follow so I could also have quick access to their content. Suggestions from other classmates are super helpful in finding great articles. If they find good articles that relate to them, chances are the content will relate to me as well.

TeachThought was one source that I got from a classmate on twitter. I really liked the article that they shared. The articles TeachThought post are about how to better yourself as a teacher, how to help your students enjoy learning, digital citizenship and so many more education topics that relate to everything I want to read about. Moreover, every article was encouraging for students and teachers alike. It really pushed helping each other out as teachers, which is super important.

The other blog I liked a lot was Emerging Educational Technologies. This blog puts out about 1 article a week, but it is all about different technologies you can use in the classroom, how to use it properly, and safely (it gave safety tips for protecting information on the web). especially now, with so much being online, I think this is such a good resource to have available, and I think it will be able to teach me a lot about being online and using online resources.