The following information below are guide points to aide you in creating a curriculum that you can use in addressing both digital citizenship and digital footprints with your students. These questions are geared more towards the middle and high school crowd. A more formal curriculum offering that tracks student understanding and satisfies the requirement for E-Rate and Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act can be accessed through learning.com at no cost for Ohio’s public and charter schools. Please visit Learning.com for more information.
**This is a living document and as such will be updated with resources as they are discovered**
The following resources found below is content that can be used to generate discussion points crafted around student involvement in the discussion. As my idea on how this topic is delivered in a class differs from the solution mentioned above…the assessment component with this topic should also be different. The assignment idea discussed in the article titled Students Dig Up Dirt to Learn About Internet Safety is how I see the assessment component being different. Each person though should come up with their own way to assess if their students have learned the topic. It also shouldn’t be a one and done unit but a topic that is referenced and reinforced throughout the year.
My vision for teaching this topic is one that is shared by Garth Holman (@garthholman)and Michael Pennington (@professormike1). I learned through a recent conference I attended that they spend the first few weeks of their class not focusing on the curriculum but rather focusing on digital footprints, digital citizenship and what that all entails. They also discussed during this conference providing a student with an avenue to have their voice heard beyond the walls of your classroom. They accomplish this through a year long blogging project. The interesting aspect of this year long blogging project is that their blogging projects cover standards taught in other classes. As an example an article or project that requires a student to compare/contrast two talking points could be used to demonstrate mastery of standards in another class. You can read more about their work at TeachersforTomorrow.net.
Our students that we have today are growing up in a world where the audience is not just classroom next door or their parents. This requires the students to create, maintain and promote themselves in a manner that up until recently had not been conceivable.
My Situation:
My name is Bob Green and I was born in 1986. The concept that I would be a published author (this blog is a publication right?) in 2014 or that a computer that was more powerful than the one that took the Apollo 11 crew into history as the first humans to step foot on the moon. My challenge would be further complicated by the fact that I had a common first and last name. My dad’s name is also Bob…the only difference being the middle name. There also was two other Bob Green’s in our town that we learned about later. One was a pastor who had no relation to us and the other was a cousin but he went by Robert. I give my mom and dad a hard time about how their lack of imagination with names has really hindered me later in life and I wonder how they did not have the foresight to see this would be an issue down the road. The response is usually “There is nothing keeping you from legally changing your name…what are you waiting on?” I was left with the question a few years ago of how am I going to distinguish myself in a world of Bob’s?
The answer was this blog. I spelled my name backwards, Neerg boB and I started creating content. My first blog post on this blog dates back to April 12th 2012 (The Book Shelf – Post 1 (2011)). At this time I have been creating content and tying it to my name and footprint for almost 2 years. Additionally I am on Twitter and advertise my website and Twitter on both services with the same being true for Linkedin. I am doing as much as I can so that my identity is established and connected through the various services that I use. I forget who said this and am paraphrasing here but essentially we are own authors, we create our own story but it is up to us to tell that story in a manner we want it to be told. As much as we have the power to create our own story, we need to take the responsibility to tell that story. In the world of today that story is told through the digital footprint we create by our actions in the online world.
The concept for presentation of having these topics and ideas taught in a discussion based format is that it allows for the free flowing of discussion. My opinion is that often times we have a preset curriculum and feel that deviating from the curriculum is not permissible. That is my opinion and it may not be an accurate reflection of the reality in your classroom. The topic discussion points allow for the inclusion of new resources that you may find on your own or through the discussions. More importantly though I feel that this unit is one that could easily be adapted for a face to face or online environment.
Topic Discussion Points:
**What is a digital footprint?**
**How do you integrate digital footprint/digital citizenship into your curriculum?**
**How do we define and create our own digitalfoot print?**
**What Public Information is Available?**
County Auditor Website
Municpal and Common Pleas Court Records
Local Newspapers (Court and Arrest Records)
**Can you delete an item from your digital footprint? Is it ethical?**
