are all questions we answer.
Chapter 3 focuses on developing sound global digital citizenship agreements that establish key criteria for students taking responsibility for themselves, for each other, and for property. Chapters 4–6 extend on this work by focusing on how you can tailor your technology use agreements to support everyone that must support your students outside the school’s walls—the teaching community, the student community, and the wider community.
In chapter 7, we wrap up with a look at embracing teachable moments, including two specific examples of schools whose students reaped the benefits of embracing sound global digital citizenship practices. We also provide a series of learning scenarios you can use in your K–12 classrooms to instill good citizenship thinking and practices in your students.
Finally, we include appendices that provide even more resources you can use. Appendix A includes a series of exercises rooted in learning about and tackling global events and issues that you can use to create mindful moments for your students. Appendix B includes a series of reproducible activity sheets you can use to engage students in understanding the importance of digital citizenship guidelines. Appendix C includes sets of reproducible digital citizenship agreements applicable to students at three learning levels (primary or elementary, middle, and high schools), teaching professionals, and the wider community.
With all this in mind, let’s get started!
| chapter 1 | Evaluating Your Acceptable Use Policy |
All schools have at least one acceptable use policy that governs how students use technology within school walls. Frequently, these policies are based on restricting or controlling the use of or access to technology, information, or websites. They often specify a list of sites that are not acceptable (Facebook, for example), behaviors that are not permissible (like using someone else’s login details), or technologies that students should not use (personal devices like smartphones, for example). This policy-focused style seldom provides any rationale for school and district decisions and rulings, and it is far from all-encompassing. The policies often address only specific sites, technologies, behaviors, and software—limiting what they cover. They are, at their core, an ineffective means to teaching students how to be good digital citizens, let alone good global digital citizens.
If you want to effect change in your school’s digital culture, a critical starting point is understanding where you are. In their book, Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) discuss the importance of knowing where you are, understanding where you want to be, and then using the difference between these—the gap analysis—to develop your plan for reaching your goal. You can apply this concept in assessing your school’s or district’s acceptable use policy.
In this chapter, we examine the process for establishing a thorough set of ethically driven acceptable use guidelines, which will form the framework for your digital citizenship agreements, by working through the following stages.
• Forming an advance team
• Establishing your purpose
• Ensuring clarity
• Creating a rationale
• Implementing the guidelines
• Supporting the guidelines
We close this chapter with a detailed look at how you manage in-school technology use once your guidelines are in place.
Advance Teams
On May 29, 1953, New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to reach the summit of Mount Everest (“Edmund Hillary,” n.d.). This was not their first visit to the region. Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance mission in 1951, which served as an advance team for his ultimate climb (“1951 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition,” n.d.). He understood that before he could make the climb, he had to better understand the environment. Whether you’re scaling mountains or transforming school or district culture, to succeed in such an undertaking requires careful, advance planning and deliberate consideration. In fact, before any great event, an advance team should perform a reconnaissance mission to survey the existing landscape.
The initial process of changing a school or district’s digital culture is twofold—(1) organize a small committee responsible for obtaining a clear understanding of the goals and (2) investigate the existing policy to determine gaps. For instance, because schools and districts are required to provide reasonable care, the infrastructure blocks many of the policy elements identified as inappropriate or unacceptable when the user connects to the network. However, outside school, when the user connects to his or her personal network, no such restrictions apply. The nature and structure of many acceptable use policies mean they only apply at school and lack the holistic nature that would see users applying the principles in all aspects of their lives.
Effecting this kind of critical cultural change requires a clear vision and input from the various community stakeholders, including staff, parents, students, and school trustees. Establishing an advance team to gain input from the entire community is valuable because it aligns all stakeholder groups. Because large groups often function as a committee from which little emerges, the team should be small with members who are engaged in and motivated by the task. Team members should be early adopters who see the benefits and significance of changes. Often, advance teams develop a champion, who becomes the public face of the change.
Given all of this, what does a better acceptable use policy look like? That’s what we look at in the rest of this chapter, beginning with gaining a better understanding of a policy’s purpose.
Purpose
When setting out to establish your school’s purpose, you must understand what digital citizenship outcomes you want to achieve. These goals should reflect the purpose of education—to prepare young people for life beyond school and enable them to be contributing and valuable citizens.
Consider the approaches taken in various international school systems. In the Australian Curriculum (n.d.a), “Capability encompasses knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions. Students develop capability when they apply knowledge and skills confidently, effectively and appropriately in complex and changing circumstances, in their learning at school and in their lives outside school.”
In the New Zealand Curriculum, “Key competencies are the capabilities people have, and need to develop, to live and learn today and in the future” (Te Kete Ipurangi, 2014).
In the International Baccalaureate (IB, 2015) curriculum, “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”
Notice that each of these curricula establishes the importance of preparing young minds for life after schooling. They focus not only on learning but also on citizenship. This is not by accident. In designing a curriculum and acceptable technology use guidelines that go hand in hand to
