I teach 7th grade English so digital citizenship is incredibly important in my classroom. My school is in the middle of going 1:1 and by next school year all my 7th grade students will have their Chromebooks that they can take home with them. Being a good digital citizen means to demonstrate and practice safe, responsible, and legal use of technology. A good digital citizen is someone who understands the rights and responsibilities that come with being online and someone who uses technology in a positive way. Since I have approximately 35 students in 5 different periods, it is incredibly hard for me to keep track of what all my students are doing and so I can only hope that by teaching them how to be a good digital citizen it will then translate to being responsible on their Chromebooks in class. Additionally, because we collaborate in class together on many assignments, it is important for them to be good digital citizens so that they know how to communicate with each other digitally.
With my students there tends to be a lot going on behind the scenes online. Maybe not so much when we are in the middle of a lesson, but from what my students often tell me, the students are not being good digital citizens when they are not in the classroom. There is a lot of online bullying that goes on with my students. Just the other day I had a student suspended for the rest of the school year for bullying a student online. So in this aspect, I think it would be incredibly important to teach students how to create an online positive community and understand the consequences of online bullying. A lot of my students are big fans of "13 Reasons Why" (even though I don't approve of their age group watching it, oh well) and so some do understand the importance of creating a positive community online. Using what they know from the show and under recent events, I believe students would take to learning about digital citizenship and specifically bullying. In this day and age, it is incredibly easy to post online to their social media sites or to text their friends, or to just post online in general. Kids have access to communicating with anyone from around the world at any time. While this can be beneficial it can also be incredibly dangerous for the kids. My students have had online pen-pals from Spain and they enjoyed talking to someone abroad, but I was there to facilitate it and to ensure that who they were talking to were all from another school. This is why I think it would be important to teach them how to be good digital citizens when communicating in an online world. They may not understand that there are unforeseen consequences or because they could easily have anonymity they could easily behave irresponsibly, cruelly or unethically. Because of their connection with communicating with others abroad, teaching them how to properly communicate online is necessary.
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A competency-based education seems very promising. I really like the idea of personalizing instruction for students and letting them go on their own pace. In one way, it is very much like that in my classroom where students are given a hard due date and given the assignments that will lead them to a final product and can work on it on their own pace as long as everything is due by the due date. With some students who understand, this is great for them because they can get it done without having to worry about waiting for everyone else. With other students who don't get it, this also gives me an opportunity to help them individually. But I don't think this is what competency-based education really looks like.
It would be hard to have this in my own classroom, the way it is intended, because there is not a lot of independence with my students. They often have to be walked step by step in order to do something. As this is my first year, I feel bad for the advanced students because I could not handle creating various levels of assignments and many of them sped through these activities. Technology can help by allowing me to create additional lessons online for students to continue to follow. Technology also allows us to vary what the students are getting. In a PD I went to, I loved the idea of having three levels of an assignment and assigning them to specific students on Google Classroom. I think with more time on my hands, creating these varying levels would be something I would definitely do. I also think Google Sites would be a great way to allow students to work on assignments at their own pace. What new questions did your study results reveal?
Some new questions I now have relate to what I would have done differently. I wonder if it would have been different had more students participated? I wonder if the study had been given over a longer period of time if the treatment group would have scored themselves higher on their collaboration. This also leads me to the question of how can I use technology to help with their collaboration skills? What do I need to do beforehand to ensure that they are effectively learning how to collaborate? What did this study suggest about a larger research agenda? What this study suggests is that technology may be valuable to teaching students to collaborate but students must be front loaded first with building that relationship with the technology. What next steps might you take to expand on or extend this study?\ Some next steps that I would take would be to figure out how I can ensure there is more engagement from the students. |