Digital Citizenship- EVERY day

Have you started talking about Digital Citizenship with your students yet? Although some may say that they will cover it at a certain point in the year and that the topic is part of their grade level curriculum, it's my opinion, that this topic is a LIFE SKILL and one that we need to cover in our classrooms DAILY! 

Digital Citizenship posters byKrystal Platt~
Click image for others

I'm not saying we need to prepare a formal 30 minute lesson each and every day, but rather, review proper digital etiquette, or Netiquette as it is also called. In today's day and age, this is critical and can be as simple as reminder on what types of items are ok to post on our Seesaw accounts, to how we leave appropriate comments for our classmates on Seesaw or on social media, to how we utilize shared devices in a respectful and responsible way. 

I had several foundational conversations with first graders this week. As we began learning how to use PicCollage, we talked about they would see others' creations when they opened the app, but being the respectful digital citizens that we are, that we know we shouldn't open another person's work and change it or delete it. We had a similar conversation when we started using Epic Books and how we needed to go into our own accounts and not a classmates. We also talked about what to do if we accidentally went into somebody else's profile and want to do if the person who was on last didn't log themselves out. Neither of these conversations were earth shattering neither took more than 5 minutes but both were important in helping to lay the foundation for these students for this year and years to come. 

With that being said, here is this week's Tech Bytes newsletter with various ideas and resources to help you get started with Digital Citizenship conversations in your classroom and a great article by Heather Mars, "Don't teach digital citizenship, Embed it!" that I encourage you to read and reflect on.

Malchow's Tech Bytes

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