Thing 24: Digital Tattoo and Digital Citizenship

In the past when teaching digital citizenship to students I would use Common Sense Media and their lessons. I found these lessons to be fantastic, easily adjustable to my time frames and groups of students I needed to work with at a particular time. I also loved Passport for the older students to use and peruse themselves to help build their skills. Recently I was introduced to Google's Interland and absolutely fell in love with the program. I think that all students would love the interactions of the robots and the different skills they are trying to overcome. I played Interland for a short amount of time and found it to be very entertaining and engaging. I am looking forward to sharing this with staff and other librarians that do not know about it so that they too can enjoy the fun.
I also found the digital curriculum offered by Google's Be Internet Safe to be similar to Common Sense Media. Many of the school in the area becoming "Google" schools so I find it fitting that Google is releasing a digital media curriculum for teachers and librarians to use with their students. This will be a great help for those schools that are Google schools. I am very interested to start implementing the Google Be Internet Awesome curriculum.

The Morristown Central School received an after school program grant this year and one of the courses I am hoping to offer to sophomores through seniors will be a college prep 101 program where we will tour the local colleges, discuss time management, etc when going to college. But I am also going to focus on digital media and their foot prints. Many students do not believe me when I tell them that colleges can and will rescind your acceptance if they deem your Internet behavior unacceptable to their image. I will be using the articles from this lesson to help show these students I will be working with how to keep their digital footprint clean and to become the best users of social media. We live in a digital world and it is hard for many students to see the consequences until they happen. It is important as educators to show our students how to use social media and the Internet properly so they can become better users.