Teaching Citizenship
I work in a great place where a lot of people are concerned about teaching kids the right skills relating to digital citizenship. But, these same people get upset from time to time (as do I) when we encounter the “easy way out” when it comes to treading with permission online. There’s a fundamental question that will divide us:
Is Google Images encouraged or loved at your school? Or is it loathed?
I’m in favor of the tool, don’t get me wrong; when I’m looking for a photo of something, it works. The reason I hate it, however, is because it works so well. The results are tangible things that we all want to play with. Nice shiny images. Teaching kids to check for copyright status, or to write the owner or creator of that image is just a drag. That’s why some people ignore it. Before you call me and other teachers lazy, think about it… the technology ought to make the process of finding content that’s being shared and other content that’s being “lent for viewing only” easy. In fact, search elsewhere, and you can do that, only looking at a cache of CreativeCommons-licensed goodness. But until the tools improve and CC ideas proliferate further…
One of the important ethical concerns in citizenship might be put this way:
What does it matter if no one catches me?
What teachers do in their own homes on their own computers over their own Internet connections I’m far less concerned with. I don’t think someone is a unholy sinner if they’ve downloaded a song or pirated a game. The temptation on that economic equation for delivery is too advantageous.
But almost anyone would agree that teaching kids to steal would go against the moral code invoked in the language of many teacher licensure documents. Whether or not we like copyright is another matter; that we we encourage good digital citizenship in everyone of our students is a matter we should care about.
Preview
In cooking up ways to deal with it, I’ve been busy this week formulating a new framework for our school division I will likely call “Citizenship21.” For upper elementary students, I’ve devised a worksheet that is designed to start instilling citizenship instruction. I know, a worksheet sounds pedestrian and so last-century, but take a look before you berate me.
This one sheet obviously doesn’t cover all the facets of digital citizenship, but it does, I think, address the concepts of ownership alongside my previous work on “Research 2.0″ skills. First, this would be used in a multimedia project where students would use media in the form of text, pictures, sound/music, or video. The form had to be flexible enough to be used in various ways. For some teachers, it may be the one and only planning project; for others, it may augment something else documenting more of the research process. Examples from this may include a presentation file, a video, a photo collage, a written report, a blog post, or even an audio-only podcast.
By asking students what media they will need forces the self-questioning about what they envision based on instructions provided by the teacher. Likely, the more open ended the project is, the better the experience.
In the second box, where will they get what they need? Will they take their own video? Pictures? Make their own music? Or will they go online? Might it be something re-mixed? The purpose for this screen is for making them more responsible for time spent on task. There’s a distinct reason for going online when you commit to the need to do so. If they plan on creating their own media, that’s great. Teachers may want something else that helps that process out, but I’ll need some feedback first on how that might go.
The third box is kind of open-ended. But it’s required. This reflection question not only can help re-enforce the learning objective for the project, but also get students to think about what success looks like and help them define a goal for their project.
The remainder of the space is for documenting what students want to use. Only space on the PDF limited the page to 5 slots; conceivably I could fit 10 on a single page if I find teachers encounter 5 is not enough. I made the form page sized so it could be printed, either to hand-in, or to be filled out. I hope students use the form online. Using Preview on Macs, they’ll able to write in the form and save it without any special software.
Filling in all the metadata for each piece of media might be a challenge, but it’s a good one. I want students to appreciate the time and effort creating good media takes; this appreciation I believe helps them define the concept of value for something that, when it comes down to it, is just worthless bits. This appreciation comes not only from the option of them creating their own media, but also in evaluating how good the resources are that they find. Using a simple tagging system of stars is a common yet powerful one for comparisons.
The keyword portion requires them to consider of a summary of the medium and building that skill of being able to summarize in the form a keyword tags I think will help them ultimately become better searchers.
Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions, praise, or criticism, I’m certainly interested in making this as useful as it can be for a letter-sized worksheet in helping students on the road to becoming better digital citizens.