NETS Standard 4
Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhibit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices.
a. advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.
I model legal and ethical use of copyrighted materials by ensuring that all images I use on my professional blog are fair use images, and by making them clickable and putting an attribution at the end of the post. I also teach my students about copyright and Creative Commons by folding those lessons into other lessons, like this one over getting ideas for descriptive writing using images.
b. address the diverse needs of all learners by using learner-centered strategies providing equitable access to appropriate digital tools and resources.
Learners have diverse needs, and flourish under different conditions. This is even true for technology use. Some of my students have more success when I use strategies that include pencil and paper work, and others feel more comfortable in digital environments. I try to give them choices whenever possible, and always enjoy discovering what choices individual students make while straddling two worlds of teaching reading and writing – the paper world and the digital world.
My digital reading notebooks are a learner-centered tool that enables me to converse with every student privately and at their personal level of understanding. With the GoogleDrive app on our iPads, now that my students are 1-1, digital reading notebooks are also an equitable way to record thinking because they can make entries off-line and upload them when they arrive at school the next day.
c. promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.
One of the best ways I know to promote digital etiquette is the explicitly teach it. Middle school students like mine haven’t had a lot of experience with interacting in digital environments, so teaching them the best ways to communicate effectively online is important.
This video is an example of me modeling poor digital etiquette, and is a good conversation starter for topics of appropriate technology use in and educational setting.
d. develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.
Using our class blog, my students were able to connect with a classroom in Hawaii and trade ideas for ways to reduce the number of students skipping school. My students became instantly engaged when they realized that students 4,000 miles away were reading and responding to what they wrote. Among other things, my students learned that on the inside, middle schoolers in Hawaii were really just like them.
I have personally engaged in collaborating with education professionals from across the world via technology and have gained cultural understanding by getting to truly know them. The image above was posted by Silvia Tolisano, a nationally renowned education technology specialist, to a Flickr group for educators of which we are both members. I never would have seen this touching tribute to a German father were it not for the connections I have made with other educators through technology.
