Tool # 11

Digital Citizenship sounds very futuristic. Can you imagine what teachers thought about as they planned their lessons 30 years ago? It certainly wasn't about how they could teach their students how to be responsible and safe online. I definitely think that safety should be the number one concern of educators when we teach our students the value and aspects of digital citizenship. Safety is our number one responsibility in our physical classroom and should be in our virtual classroom as well. With that being said I think we also need to do a better job teaching our children how to distinguish between valid and credible information versus well, junk. I think David Warlick hits the nail on the head with this simple step, "Instead of starting with a web page, displayed on the whiteboard, they [teachers] should start with Google, demonstrate how they found the page, the considerations and decisions they applied to select that page, and include in the presentation, the evidence that what's being presented is valuable...When we model authority, we shouldn't be surprised when students look for authority in every piece of information." Here I am so worried about saving time because there is soo much to squeeze in and I'm passing up a great teaching moment that will save me time in the long run.