Digital Citizenship

ISTE STANDARDS alignments

How are these artifacts used to inspire and encourage educators and students to use technology for civic engagement and to address challenges to improve their communities?

One challenge in our community this year was the devices travelling home daily. This can be stressful for families and teachers. The “Taking Care of Your School Laptop” by Jessie Hurley is one resource that I shared with 3-5 teachers to use with their students as they discussed expectations for their laptops. I also co-taught a lesson about the iPads with K-2 teachers about expectations for iPads both in and out of the classroom. The teachers really appreciated the bulletin board, “Taking Care of Your Devices”, especially as it was located by where they line up after lunch to do bathroom breaks. I saw teachers at the beginning of the year using it to reinforce expectations. Addressing the challenge of devices traveling home daily, I partnered with educators to proactively teach and to continually reinforce expectations with devices.

How do you use these artifacts to empower educators, leaders and students to make informed decisions to protect their personal data and curate the digital profile they intend to reflect?

Another challenge my teachers faced this year was how to share media with families. Many of them had used Class Dojo as a primary way of communicating with parents. In addition, people were used to using School Messenger or the Hub. The move to using School Status as our primary messaging system was difficult, particularly because of its attachment limitations. Our teachers want to share the learning that is happening in their classrooms regularly and this suddenly became a huge obstacle. The artifact, Sharing Media with Families is just one of the ways I worked with teachers to overcome this barrier. Based on the comfort level and the preferences of each teacher, I showed people how to use Canva and/or PowerPoint to create either a rolling media repository or a live newsletter. They then add the link to their living presentation to each of their weekly emails and add all media they want to share to the beginning of the presentation. I was able to help our educators navigate the transition from platforms like Class Dojo, School Messenger, and the Hub to School Status. Despite attachment limitations, we creatively adapted by using tools like Canva and PowerPoint to bridge the gap and continue to showcase classroom learning experiences.

How do these artifacts demonstrate a partnership with educators, leaders, students and families to foster a culture of respectful online interactions and a healthy balance in their use of technology?

My Kindergarten teachers approached me with a problem: they had a few students who had a hard time putting their iPads away. This was a great entry for me to showcase the great resources available from Common Sense Education. I added/adapted a lesson from CSE and shared it to them, with links to resources from their website and suggestions for how they could use the lesson and materials. I still have some work to do with getting teachers to incorporate digital citizenship into what they are doing more frequently. I have found that this model of addressing a particular issue and then showing them how to use the CSE website to find resources for other issues to be very effective. I hope to do more of this next year!

school and district alignment

How do these artifacts align with the goals of your school and district?

Teaching digital citizenship lessons like “Taking Care of Your Devices” or “Saying Goodbye to Technology” are just a 21st century version of good citizenship in general. Several of the Depth and Complexity Thinking strategies can be implemented when talking about good digital citizenship, such as Ethics, Across Disciplines, Rules, and Change Over Time.

Both our school and our district were focused on improving attendance this year. Consistent communication with parents is key to keeping attendance up. When parents regularly SEE the valuable learning happening in classrooms, they are more likely to be committed to getting their children to school every day. My teachers are phenomenal beacons of the joys of learning. They are great at creating communities within their classrooms and with the families of their students. Being able to help teachers keep those consistent connections within the new tools we have available was very rewarding. Our absenteeism rate has gone down significantly this year. While I can’t take credit for all of that, I’m glad I was able to play my small part!

Our district has been working towards incorporating the ISTE standards across the board. This is an area of growth for me. I have been able to start sharing resources from Common Sense Education, like “Saying Goodbye to Technology”. Doing formal coaching really expanded the work I was able to do with teachers. Especially in being able to have deeper conversations about the barriers and struggles they were facing in their classroom. I am looking forward to starting formal coaching at the beginning of next year. I already have several teachers signed up- yay! I believe this will be a great avenue for supporting implementation of the ISTE Standards for students and teachers. This year, I realized that my community’s knowledge and comfort with the ISTE standards is not there. I took the step of getting my wall display posted in the hall (also near the lunch exit). Next year, I would like to take one standard at a time and focus on how I can make it part of the culture at Old Bridge.

Being a Digital Citizen Advocate

in the halls