How to Instill Digital Citizenship in Students

digital neighborhood copyWhat is a parent’s greatest fear that first day they drop their precious child at kindergarten? You might think it’s whether they’ll get along with new friends or handle academic pressures. Or even that their eyes will be opened to the vastness of the Universe and no longer see their parents as the Answer to Everything.

Those are frightening, and might be ranked in the top ten–or even five–but today, the biggest concern is how to protect an innocent from the pernicious onslaught of the technology that grows like mold over every part of the education landscape. Will that trusting child be cyberbullied? Will they see stuff they shouldn’t on school websites? Will a predator find them from a naive contact online? And what about classmates–will they share bad websites found by older siblings?

It may surprise you that this scenario also keeps teachers awake at night, especially new teachers. What if they fail to protect their charges from this violent, dark online world? I remember second grade life cycle reports. I taught students how to search online images for pictures of each stage in a bug’s development, save them to student network folders, and then proudly insert them in the report. Students would find authentic and exciting pictures of ‘ladybugs’ and ‘pupae’ and ‘preying mantis larvae’ and ‘chicks’–

Chicks! That turned out to be a lousy search term. I’d warn students to search ‘baby chickens’ instead, but always, for one child each year, it wouldn’t work and–according to their parents–were permanently damaged by the pictures that popped up. They’d have nightmares. Their personalities would forever tilt to the dark side because of that picture–at least.

Truth, all stakeholders do their best, but stuff happens. If not in the classroom, at a friend’s house whose parents aren’t as vigilant as they could be, or on an iPad during library time. Educational best practices used to insist on protecting children from those eventualities, minimize exposure by unplugging kids as much as possible. That’s not the case any more. Even if we unplug them at the school house door, they plug right back in the moment they are away from the classroom. Our job as educators is to stare into the abyss of the unknown and educate: Teach these digital natives how to not just survive but thrive in the digital world.

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teacher blogs

5 Great Tech Ed Blogs You May Not Have Heard Of

great blogsHere are five more of the blogs I read to get inspired, motivated, re-energized:

  • Cybraryman–a massive resource of materials curated by a teacher. You don’t want to miss this one.
  • Diary of a Public School Teacher–this blog will warm your heart. Lisa is upbeat, hard-working, and authentically integrates technology into her students’ days. I love reading her story.
  • EdTechSandy–Sandy is one of those educators that seems to have her finger on the trends that drive technology in education. I often visit her blog to orient my thinking, see what I’ve missed at Geographically-Undesirable conferences and center my pedagogy. Here’s her bio:

    I am a professional educator with 18 1/2 years of experience in education. My areas of interest include teaching with technology, educator professional development, online blended & distance learning, social media in education, and digital citizenship. I want to build bridges between thinkers in the cloud and teachers in the classroom.

  • FreeTech4Teachers–Richard covers everything from great websites to conferences he’s attended to–of course–lots of free tech. He won the Edublog award for best blog (in various categories) for about four years running. What a wealth of resources he makes available. Here’s his bio:

The purpose of this site is to share information about free resources that teachers can use in their classrooms.

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You’re a Geek Now

BTW2If you teach technology, it’s likely you’re a geek. Even if you didn’t start out that way–say, you used to be a first grade teacher and suddenly your Admin in their infinite wisdom, moved you to the tech lab–you became a geek. You morphed into the go-to person for tech problems, computer quirks, crashes, and freezes.

Overnight, your colleagues assumed you received an upload of data that allowed you to Know the answers to their every techie question. It didn’t matter that yesterday, you were one of them. Now, you are on a pedestal, their necks craned upward as they ask you, How do I get the Smartscreen to work? or We need the microphones working for a lesson I’m starting in three minutes. Can you please-please-please fix them?

Celebrate your cheeky geekiness. Flaunt it for students and colleagues. Play Minecraft. That’s you now–you are sharp, quick-thinking. You tingle when you see an iPad. You wear a flash drive like jewelry. The first thing you do when you get to school is check your email

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Tech Tip #55: Find a Lost Shortcut

As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I can’t find the shortcut for a program I want to open. It’s not on the desktop, on the start menu or in ‘all programs’. How do I open the program?

A: Try ‘Start button’, then type in the name of the program where it says ‘start search’. The shortcut shows up.

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Do you like Online Training?

I have just started working with an online teacher training group called Curriculum Study Group. We offer online training to teachers via Google Hangouts, YouTube, instant feedback, and lots of collaborative learning. I am very excited to be part of this venture…

…but I must confess, before I joined, I wondered if teachers would be comfortable hanging out with like-minded professionals for an hour a week? Well, my good friend Amy over at CSG sent me this survey run by Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit group based in Irvine, Calif (my backyard). It seems they had the same question so did a poll. Here are the results:

SurveyNEW

What’s the take-away: Yes, across the board, principals and teachers are comfortable with online training.

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Book Review: K-8 Keyboard Curriculum

K-8 Keyboard Curriculum: The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week

You may think it impossible to find an effective keyboarding curriculum for the skimpy forty-five minutes a week you can devote to keyboarding. You teach what you can, but it always seems to be the same lessons—hands on home row, good posture, eyes on the copy. You wonder if it’s making a difference, or if it matters.

Yes, it does and there is a way. It requires a plan, faithfully executed, with your eye relentlessly on the goal, but if you commit, it works. In this book, The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week: a K-8 Curriculum, I’ll share a unique keyboarding curriculum for K-8 that I’ve seen work on thousands of students. The book includes:

  • A summary of the literature
  • Answers to the most-asked questions like ‘Can youngers learn to keyboard—and should they?’
  • The importance of the teacher to early keyboarders

The K-8 curriculum includes a lot more variety than keyboard exercises on installed software. Here’s a rundown of the pieces used:

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Tech Tip #54: How to Auto Forward a PowerPoint Slideshow

As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: My students are learning to use Powerpoint for presentations. They’ll stand in front of the class and the slideshow will play behind them. We want it to go automatically without requiring them to click the mouse or push the space bar. How do we do that?

A: Presentations are a great skill to teach students. I applaud you on this. Auto-forward isn’t difficult:

  • go to Transition on the menu bar
  • go to Timing on the right side
  • Leave ‘on mouse click’ selected (in case you as the teacher need to move it forward automatically. I’ve had students mistakenly put five minutes on a slide instead of five seconds and we would sit waiting forever if I didn’t do the mouse click)
  • set the timer to serve the needs of the slide. This will require students to practice before presenting so they can put the correct time in. A good default of 5-10 seconds.

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summer like a teacher

What’s a Tech Teacher Do With Their Summer Off?

[caption id="attachment_9121" align="alignright" width="428"]technie What I did on my summer vacation (click to see original)[/caption]

UPDATE

Are you going on road trips? Are you playing with your children, seeing friends you forgot existed, or engaging in retail therapy?

If I have time in between what I HAVE to do, I’ll join you. It might be a virtual trip, but we’ll make it happen.

Here’s what’s on my plate (so far) this summer of 2012:

  1. Attending ISTE 2012. It’s in my backyard this summer–San Diego.
  2. Attending training my school signed me up for on UbD, our new grading program (forgot the name), and robotics. One of the training sessions comes with a free lunch.
  3. Editing a K-6 technology curriculum and a keyboard book for Structured Learning (a great publisher of edtech resources for the classroom)
  4. Working on a tech thriller I hope to finish and get off to publishers. Of course it has lots of cutting edge technology in it and a quirky AI named Otto.
  5. Picking the brains of my two children. One works in cybercom for the Navy; the other the Signal Corps for the Army. Most of the stuff they can’t tell me, but I love hearing what they can.
  6. Working with tech teachers at my local school district on a technology curriculum for their K-6 classes.
  7. Presenting at several schools on tech ed topics. If you’re interested in working with me on that, please contact me at this link.
  8. Consulting with a Denver school district online to train their new tech teachers in what to teach in their computer labs next year.
  9. Getting back to my inquisitive, curious roots. I used to spend hours figuring out how to solve problems, find solutions, determine what made something tick. Now, I’m too busy. I can feel the rift in my spirit, my sapped energy, my fuzzy brain. This summer, I’m getting back to that. Here’s my promise:

For the next six weeks, when I see something techie I don’t understand, I’ll stop and ask the essential questions:

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