Digital Citizenship

We have been doing a series of digital citizenship lessons in fifth grade.  Some of the topics we have learned about:

• information- what's okay to share publicly and what should be kept private?
• power of words in a digital environment
• whose is that anyway? (copyright and avoiding plagiarism)

In the "power of words" lesson, we discussed reactions to different online statements and how to handle them.  In this photo, students decided what had "crossed the line" and what hadn't, by stepping to one side of the line (the rope going down the middle of the library!).  This photo shows the students in agreement-- the statement I had read hadn't crossed the line.  However, for many of the statements, I had a handful of students on either side of the line.  We talked about how important it is to think before typing-- should I post that?  How might the other person feel?

Ask your student- what type of information should be kept private?  What is okay to share publicly?  Can you download an image from the internet and put it in your report?  How can you respect others' work you find online?

More of these digital citizenship lessons to come-- but first we shift gears for the next few weeks to focus on a science project for the classroom.