Thing #11

As I began to read my two blogs about digital citizenship, I agree with Coolcat Teacher because our curriculum lacks the rigor or the bold thrust of digital citizenship. As a bilingual teacher, I am bombarded with keeping to the minutes that I teach each subject. Think about it--my plate is full with one way dual language, Singapore math, activ board, and so forth. My point is where is the digital citizenship that our students needs?

I hope it isn't up to me to institute and guide my students through this sector of technology. There needs to be a part in our curriculum that cover this area that coolcat teacher beautifully illustrated in her blog. I know that I will implement and cover areas of digital citizenship, but there needs to be more for our students.

In addition, the Ning on digital citizenship and Rhonddas Reflections that I read support Coolcat's blog. I think that every teacher should have a book study on digital citizenship and add to the road map this ever increasing importance of making sure our students are literate in this area. Moreover, every teacher should have a copy of this document to read.

What gets me is when I take my students on a guided website and----WHAM! There's horrible, vulgar, ugly, stuff that I have to quickly egress to another site. Our children need to be able to read and do research on the web and be savvy as to know that there are creepy and vile people out there to harm them.

I could go on and on, but digital citizenship is as important as our classroom citizenship(extension to the library). Being good stewards of our land and internet terrain must be taught and practiced. We have so much training on being good citizens, but we need to venture into the world of connectivity with our children and give them tools to use while in the digital world.

With the flexible scheduling of our school libraries, teachers need to make digital citizenship a priority!