it helps to use a tool like the one in figure 1.1 to analyze where you are and where you want to go.
Figure 1.1: Digital citizenship analysis tool.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/technology for a free reproducible version of this figure.
By using a tool such as this one, you should begin to develop an understanding of your school’s strengths and weaknesses with regard to developing your students into good digital citizens.
Because educators have long-term goals for students beyond school, they must develop students’ skills and behaviors not only to prepare them for life but also to enable them to be contributing and functional members of society. Developing a suitable digital citizenship foundation is a key objective and aspirational goal for educators in an increasingly digital world. Well-thought-out and ethically based acceptable use guidelines based on the tenets of digital citizenship can help facilitate that preparation.
Traditional acceptable use agreements aren’t really agreements, and we do not refer to them as such in this book. They are based on defined policies that are often limiting, inflexible, and compliance focused. Ethically based digital citizenship agreements instead offer guidelines that the community develops and agrees to that are encompassing and adaptable and focus on the learner’s ethical and moral development. Table 1.1 lists some of the traits most common to these agreements.
Table 1.1: Comparing Traditional Acceptable Use Policies and Ethically Based Digital Citizenship Guidelines
| Traditional Acceptable Use Policies | Ethically Based Digital Citizenship Guidelines |
| Applicable only to school environment | Applicable to all aspects of life; holistic |
| Specific and restrictive | Encompassing |
| Focused on compliance | Focused on ethics |
| Inflexible | Adaptable |
| Struggles to deal with new and emerging technologies, behaviors, and trends | Able to deal with new technologies, behaviors, and trends |
| Requires frequent updates | Requires seldom updates |
| Often written in legal or quasi-legal language making them hard to understand, particularly for younger students | Written for the specific age group, using age-appropriate language |
| Often one agreement for all student ages | Separate agreements that reflect students’ ages |
| Complex and lacking clarity | Clear and understandable |
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/technology for a free reproducible version of this table.
Once you establish the purpose for your digital citizenship guidelines, it’s equally important to ensure its language is clear to the intended audience.
Clarity
Many have the experience of installing software and then being asked to agree to the end user license agreement (EULA). Written in a legal language, these documents are long, dull, and often indecipherable to the layman. As a result, most people simply agree to the EULA without ever reading the fine print. Although it suits the license holders to have users do this, it is less than optimal for users. What exactly have you agreed to? What force and effect does it actually have?
Many of the acceptable use policies schools use are similar. In an effort to protect the school or district from potential legal challenges, lawyers often write these policies in such a manner that is unsuitable for the target audience—the students. Students sign them, because without agreeing to the document, they will not have access to the computers and online resources needed to complete their work. Unfortunately, even if the document’s terms were negotiable, they either don’t understand or don’t take the time to read these documents; it’s all too hard for them.
Consider this challenge: take your school’s acceptable use policy and copy the text into either the SMOG (simplified measure of gobbledygook) Calculator readability index (http://bit.ly/2sjLgPq) or the Lexile Framework for Reading (www.lexile.com/analyzer). How readable is your agreement? If you are unfamiliar with these tools, we talk more about them in the Student Buy-In section in chapter 5 (page 76).
As you interpret the results from a readability analysis tool, consider the following questions and what they say about your digital citizenship agreement’s language.
• Who is your digital citizenship agreement written for? Is the agreement a document the students can use and understand, or is it written to safeguard the school or district from potential litigation?
• How readable is your digital citizenship agreement? Does it suit the target audience’s needs?
• Do you have specific agreements for different age groups? Is the language of the agreement suitable for the target audience?
If you can’t satisfactorily answer these questions, you need to continue to re-evaluate the language you use in your digital citizenship agreements. Once you’ve done that, you can start to consider the rationale behind each guideline in the agreement and whether it is justified.
Rationale
Both acceptable use policies and digital citizenship agreements often make statements about what a young person should or should not do online. These well-intended and applicable statements often miss a critical element—the rationale for their existence. In designing guidelines for students, educators, and parents, we believe it’s critical to justify each guideline with a compelling case that supports each statement in age-appropriate terms. If you cannot justify and support a guideline, do not include it.
Since one of the goals of digital citizenship agreements is to apply each of their guidelines across all aspects of life, students are unlikely to adopt guidelines that their homes cannot also support. Although students may adhere to restrictive policy agreements at school, where there is a degree of supervision and monitoring, they are likely to ignore them for the other eighteen hours of the day when they are no longer in the learning environment. Ethically driven guidelines, however, stay with students no matter where they are.
After thoroughly examining your digital citizenship agreements, consider the following questions.
• Do they provide clear explanations for each guideline they propose?
• When staff present an agreement to students, do they
