Digital citizenship is more than buzz words

Last week I finished a survey from ISTE on my opinion about the role of schools in teaching digital citizenship. I believe it is not only the parents and schools share the responsibility to train their child on the safety and manage their conduct online. By coincidence, last week Edmodo released a poster  (shown below) that lays out the expectations for online behavior.

As students form their online identities, they need to reflect on how are they viewed professionally. Of course, this may be the last thing on their mind when posting updates on Twitter or FB.

Anyway, it is highly recommended for (high school) students to get on LinkedIn and work on repairing their online presence that they created. This blog post illustrates how this can be done.

Data… The Gentle Juggernaut

data (n) : pieces of information; information

The beast of data is everywhere. We are bombarded by data so much that we take it for granted. In my honest opinion, we fail to see its importance until this smelly beast is either taken from us without consent OR we are notified that it no longer belongs to us; for example, see current Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) issue.

Another example…. In general on the  school front, there exist a  struggle with maintaining an accurate database on parent contact information (which is vital when emergencies arise) and also grades (do all of those stacks of graded/ungraded assignments get inputted into the digital grade book? One missing grade can make or break a student.)

I can go on and on about data… but my main question is when did the value of this data beast increase throughout the many years to become the humongous juggernaut today? Something to think about. Can we blame No Child Left Behind (NCLB)? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? What do you think?

The Educator & Facebook

Among comments made to The Charlotte Observer article, several posters suggested that firing was too harsh a punishment for the Thomasboro teacher.

“The teacher probably didn’t understand the privacy settings on her Facebook account. Information you post can be either publicly viewable or something that is just seen by your friends. She probably thought what she was posting was private, but left the default settings on to let everyone see your profile,” commented BluNews.

Quoted from THE Journal article

I may have briefly discussed in a previous post in how educators need to be responsible when embracing web 2.0 resources. One of these resources called Facebook (FB) have created personal havoc for not only teachers, but people in general not aware of the many privacy setting to protect yourself from outside scrutiny;  even when being careful of one’s own actions.

There are many examples as quoted above to represent the lack of what Nick O’Neill from the AllFacebook.com blog  has taken the time to share. Nick demonstrates how to get a firm control on FB’s privacy settings here.

Please take heed to these precautions and enjoy what the web has to offer in healthy collaboration!