Digital Citizenship

The shared Google ecosystem I use often with students and staff. This year I have done quite a bit more with e-backpack, sharing documents with students, and have gotten away from Google Drive a bit. I do use Google forms to create quizzes for students and have also used it as a way to gather feedback from students on ideas for my ecology class, school garden, and composting program.

One way that I have used Google drive for a digital literacy is to have students create and share with me annotated citations for a research project.This is a basic level of digital literacy, but it does instill in students the value of using varied resources and citing them properly. One way I can see using Google forms at the beginning of the school year is to create some questions to gain a better understanding of how students use digital literacy in their lives. Asking them questions such as what social media sources do you use, what type of video games do you play. This should provide for me insight into their own lives and perhaps some ideas on incorporating digital citizenship in the classroom.

One positive way that I use Twitter as a school project in ecology was to inform students and staff about the recycling and composting in the cafeteria. A group of four students created a Twitter account that provided statistics and information from the benefits of composting and recycling. We also have two school wide initiatives around digital literacy. The first one occurs at the beginning of the school year, where all students attend a 20 minute presentation on learning about their digital footprint.The Technology Integrator, goes over what a digital footprint is and how it can be used in positives ways for students. She gives suggestions and examples on enhancing their  digital footprint. The second initiative takes place in October and it's called digital citizenship week. During this week students are introduced to a variety of different digital citizenship videos and handouts that teachers can use during Home-base. There was also a guest speaker who talked about the role social media plays in people's lives. I think both of these initiatives helped staff and students recognize the importance digital citizenship in all of our lives.

One of the ways that I would like to promote digital citizenship in my classroom is through my ecology class. We do quite a bit of initiatives and project-based learning with the school garden, composting, recycling, and decreasing food waste in our cafeteria. I would like to start off discussing what a digital footprint is and the ways students can enhance their footprint in their careers and college. Using Twitter, blogs, Instagram, tumblr Facebook to get the word out about the positive things my class is doing will enable students to see the various ways social media can be used. It will also let the community know some of the projects we are working on within the high school. For this assignment I would have students get into various groups and pick a form of social media they feel comfortable with. We could use Google drive and have a shared folder called social media for each form of social media there would be a document, for example Twitter, where students can give feedback and input as to how the form of social media could be used.