Digital Citizenship: Resource Roundup
Check out Edutopia's collection of articles, videos, and other resources on internet safety, cyberbullying, digital responsibility, and media and digital literacy. (Updated 10/2013)BY EDUTOPIA STAFF

Digital Citizenship Resources
D.S Curriculum from Common Sense Media:
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

When I visit a digital age classroom where students are actively using technology tools for inquiry and creating new products to show their learning, I see a similarity to an ecosystem. The students and teacher interact within the classroom environment in an organic way to construct learning experiences. What are the components of this digital age learning ecosystem?..

A Sense of Community
Teachers intentionally nurture a community in the digital age learning ecosystem. They know the interests, strengths, and challenges of their students, and they are eager to learn alongside them. Rather than viewing themselves as content experts with the primary purpose of directing instruction, teachers in the digital age learning
ecosystem relish the roles of learner and explorer. Digital citizenship is ingrained throughout the practices of the classroom. Because students have typically developed their own norms and practices for how they should co-exist with technology, teachers in the digital age learning ecosystem must encourage appropriate netiquette and the responsible use of technology tools and resources.

 Essential Questions
Teachers should design lessons or  units of study within the digital age learning ecosystem by posing essential,  open-ended questions.

read article by Tim Clark ... 
in Digital Age Learning posted on July 6, 2014

Adpated from an Eduemic article edited to suit CC JS.
read the full article (US) here 

Technology and education are pretty intertwined these days and nearly every teacher has a few favorite tech tools that make doing his or her job and connecting with students a little bit easier and more fun for all involved.

Yet as with anything related to technology, new tools are hitting the market constantly and older ones rising to prominence, broadening their scope, or just adding new features that make them better matches for education, which can make it hard to keep up with the newest and most useful tools even for the most tech-savvy teachers.

Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used, that should be part of any teacher’s tech tool arsenal this year, whether for their own personal use or as educational aids in the classroom.

Social Learning
These tools use the power of social media to help students learn and teachers connect.

1. Edmodo: Teachers and students can take advantage of this great tech tool, as it offers a Facebook-like environment where classes can connect online.
2. Grockit: Get your students connected with each other in study sessions that take place on this great social site.
3. EduBlogs: EduBlogs offers a safe and secure place to set up blogs for yourself or your classroom.
4. Pinterest: You can pin just about any image you find interesting on this site, but many teachers are using it as a place to collect great lesson plans, projects, and inspirational materials.
   
5. Schoology: Through this social site, teachers can manage lessons, engage students, share content, and connect with other educators.
6. Quora: While Quora is used for a wide range of purposes, it can be a great tool for educators. It can be used to connect with other professionals or to engage students in discussion after class.
7. ePals: One of the coolest benefits of the Web is being able to connect with anyone, anywhere. ePals does just that, but focuses on students, helping them to learn languages and understand cultures different from their own.
   
8. Twitter:  we have twitter accounts set up for each Year Level in Junior Schooling so that classes can post for specific projects, communication with parents and the wider - global - community. 

Learning
These educational tools can help you to make lessons fun, interesting, and more effective.

1. Khan Academy: Many teachers use this excellent collection of math, science, and finance lectures and quizzes to supplement their classroom materials.
2. FunBrain: If you’re looking for a great collection of educational games, look no further than FunBrain. On it, teachers can take advantage of fun tools for math and reading.
   
3. Educreations: Educreations is an amazing online tool for the iPad that lets teachers (or students) create videos that teach a given topic. Perfect for studying or getting students to show off their knowledge.
4. Animoto: Animoto makes it simple to create video-based lessons or presentations for the classroom and to share them with students or anyone else.
5. Socrative: Available for computers, mobile devices, and tablets, this student response system engages students through games and exercises on any device they have on hand. Even better, teachers can easily assess student progress and track grades.
6. Kerpoof: On Kerpoof, students can get creative with their learning with games, interactive activities, drawing tools, and more that are both fun and educational.
   

Lesson Planning and Tools
Use these tech tools to pull together great lessons and design amazing and memorable student projects.

1. Teachers Pay Teachers: Have great lessons to share? Looking for something to add to your classes? On this site you can do both, selling your own class materials and buying high-quality resources from other teachers.
2. Planboard: Make sure your lessons are organized and that your day runs smoothly with the help of this amazing online tool designed just for teachers.
3. Timetoast: Timetoast is a pretty cool for student projects, allowing them to build sleek, interactive timelines in minutes.
4. Capzles: There are so many different ways that Capzles can be used in the classroom, there’s bound to be an application that fits your needs. What does it do? Capzles makes it simple to gather media like photos, videos, documents, and even blog posts into one place, making it perfect for teaching, learning, or online projects.
5. Prezi: Want to build presentations that will wow your students? Make use of this online tool that makes it simple to do all kinds of cool things with your lessons, even allowing collaboration between teachers.
6. Wordle: Create stunning word clouds using Wordle, a great complement to language lessons of any kind. Try also Tagxedo for a word cloud creator to create specific shapes and with many more options.
7. QR Codes: QR codes (or quick response codes) are showing up with greater frequency in education. If you’d like to get in on the trend, you’ll need a tool to create and manage the codes like Delivr and one to read codes, like any of those listed on this site. See also our 
8. Quizlet: Quizlet makes it easy for teachers to create study tools for students, especially flashcards that can make memorizing important information a snap.
9. Google Docs: Through Google Docs, teachers can create and share documents, presentations, or spreadsheets with students and colleagues as well as give feedback on student-created projects.
   
10. YouTube: Not all schools allow YouTube, but they are missing out as the site contains a wealth of great learning materials for the classroom. There’s even a special education-focused channel just for teachers and students.
11. TED-Ed: TED isn't just a great place to find inspiration anymore, the site also contains numerous videos that are organized by subject and can help you to teach everything from how pain relievers work to Shakespearean insults.
12. Glogster: Glogster is a social site that lets users mash up music, photos, videos, and pretty much anything else you’d like. It’s a great way to create learning materials and a handy tool for creative student projects.
13. Creaza: Want to bring your student projects into the 21st century? Creaza can make that possible, offering tools to brainstorm, create cartoons, and edit audio and video.
14. Mentor Mob: On Mentor Mob, you or your students can create a learning playlist, which is essentially a collection of high-quality materials that can be used to study a specific concept.

Useful 
ToolsThese tools can help you to stay connected, organized, and increase the ease of building multimedia lessons and learning tools.

1. Evernote: Capture great ideas, photos, recordings, or just about anything else on your Evernote account, access it anywhere, and keep it organized. A must-have tool for lesson planning.
2. Twitter: There are so many ways Twitter can be used in education. Teachers can connect with other educators, take part in chats, share their ideas, or even use it in the classroom to reach out to students.
3. Google Education: Google offers a number of great edtech resources for teachers, including email and collaborative apps, videos, lesson plan search, professional development, and even educational grants.
4. Dropbox: Easily store, share, and access any kind of data from anywhere with the easy-to-use and free Dropbox service.
5. Diigo: Diigo lets you treat the web like paper-based reading material, making it simple to highlight, bookmark, take notes, or even add sticky notes.
6. Apple iPad: One of the most widely used, though expensive, tech tools being used in today’s classroom is the Apple iPad. With a host of educational apps being developed for the device, it’s become a favorite of teachers and students alike across the nation.
7. Aviary: Aviary is a suite of tools that make it easy to edit images, effects, swatches, music, and audio or to create and modify screen captures.
8. Jing: If you’re teaching kids about tech or just about anything else, a great screenshot program is essential. Jing is one great option that allows teachers to take screenshots as images, record up to five minutes or videos then edit and share the results.
9. Popplet: You and your students can use Popplet to brainstorm ideas, create mindmaps, share, and collaborate.
10. Google Earth: From geography projects to learning about geological processes, Google Earth can be an amazing and fast way to show students anywhere in the world.
11. DonorsChoose: Need funding for a classroom project? You can get it through this site that hooks up needy teachers with willing donors.
12. SlideShare: With SlideShare, you can upload your presentations, documents, and videos and share them with students and colleagues. Even better, you can take advantage of materials that other have uploaded as well.
13. LiveBinders: Like a real-life three ring binder, this tech tool allows you to collect and organize resources. Much better than a binder, however, the site also comes with tools to connect and collaborate and a virtual whiteboard.
14. AudioBoo: Through this tool, you can record and share audio for your students or anyone else.

Social Media has exploded in popularity and impact in the recent years. While initially aimed at adults and older teens, it has quickly evolved to be incorporated into the digital world of all ages including young children.

Social media brings many opportunities but also many challenges. Teachers, parents and carers are quite rightly seeking to tread carefully in this area to protect children.

Here are a few guidelines to assist:

1. Abide by age limits. Facebook, for example has a 13 yr old limit. If you allow underage access to this or other sites, think about the underlying message you are sending to your children. Younger children can still be involved and educated about social media through parent modelling how they use their social media sites (e.g. sharing a family photo on Facebook), talk about issues such as language use, face tagging, hash tagging, privacy settings and so on. There is also increasing use of social media in children's games, on TV news and current affair shows and so on. There is explicit education on social media at school too via safe positive avenues such as The Learning Place and class blogs.
2. Monitor internet use:  It is well advised by all research and experts that internet use for primary aged children should be monitored. Find out how to set parental limits on your technology. This can limit the type of sites, hours of use and so on. If your child has any subscriptions - make it a condition that you know all usernames and passwords. Consider a good web
3. Teach basic safety and netiquette. Research has shown that explicit and frequent instruction relating to digital citizenship is needed to help our children use the internet wisely and make smart, informed choices.  This generation of 'digital natives' may be good at USING technology, and they may even know more about the technology than their parents in some cases, but they are not automatically wise. Developmentally, they need help and guidance from parents, carers and teachers to develop a good sense of digital citizenship. A useful analogy is that you don't do anything on the internet that you would not do in real life:  

• We don't give away personal details 
• We don't talk to strangers (unless in an environment that is checked or with trusted adult guidance present)
• We are not left in parks or shopping centres by ourselves when young - don't leave children to roam unattended on the internet.
  
• Children happily use 'house rules' and 'classroom rules' . Set up your 'house rules' for their internet use too
  
• Behave with good manners, kindness and good sense.
• Alert parents or a teacher if anything seems or feels wrong. They will be able to assist.
• Don't say or write anything that you wouldn't want mum, dad, teachers or the world to see. Once you write it or send a photo, you can't take it back and you can't control who shares is.
• Check out the wide range of resources on digital citizenship for children at http://www.ictatcc.com/digital-citizenship.html 

1. Be aware of new fads:  when a child comes home and says 'Everyone has it" or 'Everyone is doing it" it is rarely true!! It's just exaggeration or emotional blackmail.  Some to definitely stay away from are Ask.fm and the Snap Chat app.  Article on Ask.fm
   
2. Read the terms and conditions:  If you actually read some of the outrageous terms and conditions some of the apps and sites have - you would not accept many of them. For example, some apps that are unrelated to 'email' or 'phone' apps, are asking to give full access to all of our contacts details. Now we wouldn't give away the names, phone numbers and addresses of our friends and family normally  - why on earth would we allow strangers to have access to this? For what purpose? And then if you learn WHERE the companies are, you'll find some are in places with a very different view on human rights. Again, I recommend you read the terms and conditions, as tedious as that is. If you are in doubt but really want an app, look for 'reviews' from independent and trustworthy sources. 
3. Highlight how digital media has helped improve our world:  while it might be easy to focus on the negative, the digital world is here to stay and will become increasingly prevalent in our lives, according to the trends. It is important to focus on how this can help us, how it can change lives for the better, how it can improve our experiences, and even how it can make companies and governments more accountable. 

It is always prudent to remember that what goes on the internet stays on the internet and forms part of our digital footprint.  Let's make our contribution respectful and positive.

AUSTRALIA SAFER INTERNET DAY   organised by CYBERSMART

This year, Safer Internet Day is on Tuesday February 11th.

The theme for this year is “Let’s create a better internet together”. 
This theme about online rights and responsibilities reminds us of what it means to be a positive digital citizen.

With this in mind, the ACMA has a number of resources for the whole community to use.

• Safer Internet Day website  click here
• Cybersmart for kids (ACMA)  - Middle Primary)
• Cybersmart for young kids (ACMA - Early Primary)
  

Find out more information on the cybersmart website. 

For those new to ACMA resources - a little background....
Cybersmart is a national cybersafety and cybersecurity education program managed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), as part of the Australian Government's commitment to cybersafety. 

The program is specifically designed to meet the needs of its target audiences of children, young people, parents, teachers and library staff. 
See more

More resources:
17 Cartoon Videos Explaining the Internet and Internet Safety to Kids