Thing #11 Digital Citizenship

The last, and possibily the easiest, THING for me to do!

I taught an entire until on Digital Citizenship last year and own the book. I also had two classrooms of ninth graders participate in the Digiteen Project which is an online collaboration project with 20 schools all over the world participating in a study of digital citizenship.

So here is a SHORT synopsis of my unit, as taught to 9th grade:

-Introduction to the idea of Video Citizenship by watching Frontline PBS Special "Growing Up Online" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/

-Look at website and discover 9 elements of digital citizenship http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html

-Creating a Wiki Dictionary with digital citizenship vocabulary http://whswega.wikispaces.com

-Powerpoint Presentations on one vocabulary word of their choice

-Ongoing participation in Digiteen Project (this was a 6 week project), which was the "meat" of the unit

-"Elluminate" discussion with author Mike Ribble (yes, we really got to speak to him virtually).

This was by far the coolest unit I taught last Spring, but it got an interesting reaction from my students. Because they are all digital citizens and I am a digital immigrant, they thought all of this was "just common sense". Their parents, on the other hand, were pretty amazed--I actually had a mother come in for a conference so I could give her a hands on demonstration of a wiki, which she was trying to learn at work!