clearly understand them? Or, are students simply asked to read the agreement and sign it?
In considering these questions, it’s important that you identify any weak areas, where an agreement guideline does not provide a suitable rationale for its existence. Consider, for example, the following guidelines for a school grappling with establishing a rationale for social media use.
• Poor guideline: The use of social media at school is banned.
• Better guideline: The use of social media or any online resources should be educationally focused and not be a distraction to learning.
Understand that the goal is to avoid off-task behavior that negatively impacts student learning outcomes while also accepting that students can productively use social media platforms as tools for online collaboration and peer mentoring. The first guideline does not accomplish this goal, but the second guideline does.
When you have a clearly established rationale for each guideline in a digital citizenship agreement, you can begin to focus on its implementation.
Implementation
Although less common in U.S. schools, in many schools around the world, one of the key aspects of daily life is the school diary. This provides a place for the vital practice of recording the important elements of the school day or week, homework, assessments, and sporting and cultural events. In Andrew’s school, at the front of the diary in a place of pride is the digital citizenship agreement. There are three separate, school-specific agreements for each of the district’s three different schools—primary (elementary), middle (intermediate and junior high), and high (senior or secondary) school. Parents can also easily access them on the school website.
Each year, the eleventh-grade students work through a series of lessons focused on the digital citizenship agreements and the broader concept of global digital citizenship. The school asks these students to contribute to the process of updating and refreshing each guideline within the digital citizenship agreements. They propose changes and modifications that the school may or may not accept, and that reflect their changing digital environment. A similar process happens in the seventh grade. The school selected these grades because, in the New Zealand curriculum framework, they were the change point from primary school to middle school and from middle school to senior school. These points represent a significant change in the expectations schools place on students and their responsibilities as learners. The students’ ages also match well to significant periods of cognitive development and their development of ethical foundations.
Providing students with input and valuing their contribution increase student body buy-in. Any modifications to the school’s agreements are made in the spirit and ethos of providing the students with clear and appropriate guidance for global digital citizenship at school and beyond.
However, implementation goes beyond just a few sessions seeking student engagement in the process. It must be more than simply publishing the guidelines in a diary, on posters in the classrooms, or on the school’s website. Effective and transformational implementation includes three groups of key stakeholders actively modeling these concepts—(1) students, (2) staff, and (3) the wider community. In particular, teachers’ expectations of acknowledgement of sources, fair-use rules, and acceptable online behavior must be so natural and so ingrained that they become part of all teaching.
Consider the following questions.
• How often do staff use the agreements (or the guidelines that the agreements represent) in community, school, and classroom activities? Never? Once per year? Once per term? Once per week? Daily? Every lesson?
• Where are the digital citizenship agreements? Are they displayed in the classroom, made part of the school publications, and immediately at hand? Are they stored away and not easily accessible?
In a perfect world, the agreement guidelines are integrated into all activities that occur across the school. Although it is good to have the agreements as a poster in the room, or appended to the school diary or planner, these are merely starting points. The ultimate goal is still to integrate the principles into everyday teaching and learning so that they become second nature.
With fully developed digital citizenship agreements in place, agreements that include clear and rational guidelines, you can turn your attention to their support.
Support
To make sustainable and long-lasting change for how students use technology, there must be an agreeable and shareable vision from which to derive attainable goals. There must also be a clear process to facilitate the change. The participants must not only want change but also must have the necessary skills to change. Finally, the necessary resources and support to enable change must be in place.
Changing behavior patterns in a digital world requires support resources and processes. It’s not enough to simply have a suitable set of guidelines; there must be support resources and processes that make the changes and behaviors sustainable.
These support resources could include using a spiral curriculum that embeds age-appropriate teaching opportunities into the teaching and learning framework. The spiral curriculum could offer materials for all members of the school community, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, and board members. Certainly, the spiral curriculum also requires suitable processes for dealing with concerns.
Consider this challenge: list and discuss the agreements’ support resources and processes, and then reflect on their efficacy.
Although it is important for each guideline in your digital citizenship agreements to apply inside and outside of school walls, once you craft and implement your digital citizenship agreements, you still need to contend with how your schools govern technology use within the building.
In-School Use
Even with well-crafted and supported use agreements, you will face questions about how you manage technology access within school walls. What level of access do you give students? How do you monitor student use, and what are the consequences for use violations? How does this impact the many stakeholders in your community? The following sections examine each of these in turn.
Access
Although your ultimate goal is for students to monitor their own Internet use, you will still face questions of how to manage students’ access to online resources. Many schools either operate under an open-access system (one that operates without content restrictions), or one that uses a blacklist (a list of blocked websites or types of websites) or a whitelist (where students can only access a specific list of preapproved websites). Consider these questions.
• What level of access to online materials and websites does your school have? Consider access to social media, file-sharing sites, collaborative tools (like Google Docs, wikis, and so on), as well as unacceptable materials.
• What mechanisms do you use to manage this access?
• Who makes the decisions about what is accessible and what is not?
• Is this an educational or technical decision?
In our experience, some schools try to restrict access to only the sites that the school deems suitable (a whitelist). As many schools soon discover, the prevalence of smartphones with access to high-speed connectivity, and the ease of setting up a personal hot spot to bypass these restrictions, make these attempts ineffectual. To make matters worse, pushing students to these lengths results in the school losing any ability to track and monitor their activities as they circumvent the restrictive network.
