Activity 9: Digital Citizenship

Scenario 2
Mr. Kirk is excited to use Google Apps for Education with his third grade students.  He jumps in with both feet and his classes are off and running.  Because he started so quickly, he never thought about putting policies and procedures in place.  After a few weeks, students are spending more time off task than on.  They are creating and sharing Docs as a way to bully each other, adding inappropriate comments in Google Classroom, and deleting or changing other students' work.  Mr. Kirk doesn't know what to do, so he suspends all technology use in his class, abandoning it completely and any of its benefits.

Before we do anything with students, whether using technology or not, it is part of our job in planning the activity to anticipate what might go wrong and plan for that.  As part of the preparation process we should be setting up policies and procedures that will ensure that students are engaged in an academic task that is meaningful to their learning while they are with us.  That is what their parents trust us to do and what we are paid for.   Mr Kirk needs to slow down, pull back and put some practices in place that will ensure that students are getting positives out of the technology.  He should not abandon its use all together.  After his mistake, he now knows what students will do wrong and he can train them how to correctly use Google docs and apps.  He has a good teaching opportunity in which students could help come up with the policies after some discussion. 

Scenario 4
Mrs. Janeway decided to have her middle school students create digital projects then use Snagit to create video presentations of their projects.  Mrs. Janeway discovered in the computer lab while her eighth grade students were creating their accounts that Snagit required parental permission for students under 13.  This didn't pose a problem for her eighth graders, but Mrs. Janeway panicked because the following period she planned to do the same activity with her sixth graders.


As an educator it is my job to make sure that the technology that I am using with students is appropriate for the age of the students that I am working with.  If Mrs. Janeway wants to use the Snagit app with her students, she will need to first discuss with her principal what she plans to gain by exposing her students to this application.  She then need to email or send a letter home to the parents of the students so that they can give permission.  She should have allowed at least two weeks for this process.  

I'm am SO excited to have a set of Chromes in my classroom as I really know that I will be able to enhance my instruction and have a more streamlined way to collect and analazye data so that I can provide even more timely feedback to students, but I AM REALLY NERVOUS too.  It comes with a lot of responsibility.  I'm new to a lot of the things that I want to use and I just don't want to go to fast and then end up like Mr. Kirk from above.  I know that we have a lot of talented people at EW that I can ask questions of that have used a lot of these platforms before.  I do wish Moundsview had a bare-bones technology or digital citizenship presentation that would help me to get started to make sure that I hit the main points and the must-dos for all.