5 "Dangerous" Things for Your Kids.

As many of you are, I am a TED.com fanatic. I find my intellect being challenged on a daily basis by incredible minds and provocative thoughts. The following short episode from TED.com is the inspiration for this post.



Sooooo...this begs the quest to list...

5 "dangerous" DIGITAL things for your kids.

1. Sign up for an email account.

There are so many free ones that are web based; yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. Use the opportunity to talk to your child about the importance of tone in their writing. Discuss what respectful use of email looks like. Empower your kids to take control of their own inbox. Brainstorm ways that you can filter out and/or eliminate unwanted SPAM. Explore the perils of phishing. Teach them what to delete and to never give out personal information, no matter how official the email looks. Give them real relevant reasons to use email. Keep in touch with long distance relatives etc. Sign up with epals and connect with kids around the world.

2. Make social networking accounts

You are never too young to establish a Personal Learning Network (PLN). Twitter allows children to network through micro-blogs. Sites like Facebook and MySpace used appropriately allows  students to network and share ideas. It connects kids. Some of my colleagues would say that the digital natives are less connected because they don't know how to communicate. They don't meet face to face enough. I agree with David Warlick who said in his k12 Online 2007 Keynote, that this generation of kids is more connected than any other generation has ever been. I think that they place different emphasis on the types of interactions that older generations hold dear. This does not make them more or less connected, it makes them differently connected. In addition having an account with a social networking site provides kids with an opportunity to learn about policy setting, permissions, digital footprints, and permanency. A great post that pertains to many of the issues around facebook can be found here: Facing Facebook. This post by David Truss and the subsequent comments really hit the nail on the head when it comes to approaching Facebook in a proactive way. 

3. Create a blog and have an opinion.

Interact with other people's ideas. If you are worried about revealing too much personal information use a pseudonym for anonymity while still establishing a net identity. This also becomes a great opportunity to discuss how much info you share in a profile. The power of audience has an amazing effect on student writing. The power of commenting on someone else's writing and establishing a feedback loop is tenfold. My favourite example of this comes from a former student of mine over at Wandering Ink. Her post "How to Prevent the Another Leonardo da Vinci" ended up turning so many heads that it was nominated for EduBlog's most influencial post in 2007.

4. Sign up for a kid's virtual space

Webkinz, and Club Penguin for example are as close to bubble wrapping your young as they learn about e-commerce and how to manage a budget. The virtual worlds are like Second Life Light. They can sort of instant message through canned phrases. Kids explore architecture and mapping. They learn to care for a "pet". They are introduced to gaming through educational opportunities. They build a portfolio. All these skills translate into real net skills. These sites are great training grounds.

5. Contribute to a wiki, better yet establish a wiki.

Almost everyone has heard of Wikipedia. Go find an entry that you know something about and make a contribution. Be sure to track any changes to that entry. PBwiki and Wikispaces are also great starting places if you are looking to establish your own wiki. Collaboration is a highly sought after skill, the sooner you learn how to be a productive member of a collective the better. If you are looking to start somewhere, start with our Digital Citizen Project.

Bonus activity

Learn about hacking, malware, zombies, botnets, anonymous proxies and all the things that "bad guys" use to wreck the digital landscape and learn how real people are affected by these actions. Learn why digitally responsible people need to take back the net like students who take back the playground from the bullies.

It is our job as the adults (parents, guardians and educators) to provide children with opportunities to explore the digital world armed with skills, understanding and knowledge. None of which can be accomplished by filtering, blocking or banning.

None of these things should happen in a locked bedroom. Get involved in your kids' digital life. Help them navigate the the digital world and establish a digital footprint (must read article by Will Richardson in Educational Leadership) that is flattering. Like Gever Tulley suggests, real learning requires bumps and bruises. Be there to pick your kids up, kiss them better and surge on.

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Digital Citizen Project

Over the last year or so, I have been trying to mull an idea around that would allow me to alleviate the fear based concerns of parents and staff about our children using the net for all sorts of reasons. I have read blogs and articles, watched webcasts and read books (gasp) on various models of motivating and empowering students to be intrinsically digitally responsible.

Some of you may have read my past thoughts on the matter here, here and here.

While there are many lessons on cyberbullying, good resources on safe internet use and articles about risks of sharing your identity, there is very little out there that seeks a proactive approach to empowering students to demonstrate that the majority of students are using the net in a responsible, respectful and effective way.

So as of today (Dec 3rd, 2008), I launched a public wiki called "The Digital Citizen Project" (http://digitalcitizenproject.wikispaces.com). Much to my chagrin there is another project at the university of Illinois that has the same name. The goal of their project is not at all the same as our goals. Having said this, I dig the name so I hope that we can share.

At this stage we have 5 goals. They include;

1. Create a global student driven wiki that espouses the beliefs of digitally responsible students

2. Host examples and stories of students working to eliminate irresponsible internet use

3. Facilitate a student driven curriculum for safe web living, learning and sharing

4. Network students, educators and parents who want to break down fear based concerns of internet use in schools and homes

5. Provide students, educators and parents with a resource for facilitating the conversation about what it means to be digitally literate and digitally responsible.

Please visit and add your own goals (it is a public wiki after all) and share with your personal learning network. I call on educators from around the world to find students from elementary schools, middle schools and secondary schools from around the world who want to show the world what it means to be a positive digital citizen. Students who want to drive policy, trends and ideas. Students who want to show that school districts need not be concerned about minimally filtered networks. That the net and web 2.0 is ubiquitous and an essential tool for learning. The future is now and the future is respectful, responsible and intelligent. Help us prove it!

Responsible Digital Citizens Start by Being Responsible Children

An interesting phenomenon occurs when you ask students what the school rules are. Despite not having school rules listed anywhere in the school and without ever having explicitly taught a set of school rules to the student body, students are able to recite a whole cacophony of rules. No running in the halls, not hitting, no name calling, no spitting, no chewing gum, no cell phones, no hats, no pushing and the list goes on. The "NO" list.

At an assembly at the beginning of the year our staff was able to facilitate this innate sense of rule following to an understanding of what it is to be a school citizen. Through a series of activities, big buddies worked with little buddies on converting perceived rules into beliefs. For example, no running, no hitting, no pushing was transformed into "At our school we believe in SAFETY". This process taken from the book "Creating the Conditions" by Diane Gossen proved to be a vital step in changing the conversation. Instead of "Jonny stop running" the conversation becomes "Jonny can you tell me what we believe in at our school?" Since Jonny was part of coming up with the school belief of SAFETY he is able to self correct and begin to internalize appropriate hallway behaviour.

At our school the students were able to boil it down to 6 core beliefs. They include the following:

At our school we believe in Responsibility, Healthy Living, Inclusion, Honesty, Safety and Respect Y.O.E. (yourself, others & the environment). Interestingly, this list was extremely similar to lists that other schools that have gone through this process have come up with.

Next we learned about inukshuks. Simply put inukshuks are Inuit stone statues that are meant to serve as guiding posts. We took our 6 beliefs and cut out big paper stones. On each stone we wrote one of the beliefs. Then we created a giant 2 dimensional inukshuk on the back wall of our stage. Surrounding each of the belief words on the stones the students then listed what that belief looked like, sounded like and felt like. The whole process served as an excellent vehicle for creating a common language of social responsibility and for empowering student ownership of student behaviour.

This school-wide "social contract" has been in place for just over a month. Student know that when they find themselves in the office, the conversation will be about our beliefs and about the student finding a way to repair their mistake through problem solving. Students who make mistakes are seen as providers of learning opportunities and if all involved learn from the mistake the students return to the community strengthened by their new knowledge.

The jump to the virtual world is an easy one. Our beliefs transcend firewalls, routers and servers. Rather than depend on filters, blocked popups and lock down procedures. We help our students understand that being digitally responsible citizens is no different than being responsible school citizens. Along with teaching students about internet safety, students are expected to behave in a manner that adheres to our school beliefs. When a student makes a mistake around internet behaviour, we treat it the same as if the student made a mistake in the real world. We help that student repair any damage done and we empower the student to meet the need saught by the misguided behaviour in another way.

The conversation now revolves around understanding our needs. Because all behaviour has purpose and the purpose is to meet one of the following needs: Fun, Belonging, Mastery, Freedom, Survival. The virtual world is yet another avenue for students to meet these needs. It is important that we help students meet these needs in the virtual world just like we help students meet these needs in the real world. Once you give the students ownership of their behaviour and you give them the vocabulary to articulate their needs the "discipline" conversation changes.

Some of my colleagues don't trust this process, what do you think?

Photo credit: Dave MacLean - Still Water Inukshuk - Powell River BC Canada

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad and There You Have the Facts of Life...

Nancy Willard, the director for the Center for Safe and Responsible Use of the Internet wrote an article discussing the various aspects of internet safety. It is articles like this that worry me. Almost like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Student use of Web 2.0 technologies is expanding, along with incredible opportunities for interactive educational activities -- and a host of risk and management concerns. Even the most die-hard techies now recognize that filtering systems are not the solution they were promised to be. In many schools, students regularly bypass the filter -- not to get to porn sites, but to access their favorite social networking sites.

This statement gives me hope. It is a recognition of two key facts of student internet use.

Fact 1: Filters are useless! In fact blocking social networking sites only creates a sense of taboo and heightens the natural and healthy rebellion nature of adolescent users. Many of my students see the filters as a challenge. I have, in the past, played right into this natural tendency and challenged my students to find me a YouTube clip that pertains to the area of curriculum that we are studying. Both the students and I knew full well that YouTube clips would be blocked and yet the students found a way around the filter using a proxy server. The interesting angle to this story is that the students that I was working with were in grade four. One of the students' brother had shown him how to use a proxy server. All he did was google "proxy server" and "YouTube" and in about 3 minutes we were watching a YouTube clip of an old Tom and Jerry cartoon. We were discussing the violence seen in cartoons.

Fact 2: Students (especially elementary students) do not seek the negative aspects of the net. We start with the premise that the vast majority of children wish to do good things and be good people. In fact, whenever I have experienced a "mistaken" destination that involved porn or the like, the students have always either pressed back and quickly told me about it or turned the monitor off and told me about it. They are more embarrassed than anything. We have alerted the rest of the students to the "mistake", added it to our learning experience and have moved on without making a big deal about it.

That was the good from the article (the sheep), now for the bad (here comes the big bad wolf).

Willard goes on to talk about providing 5 key and comprehensive strategies to keeping students safe. The first component is the one that bothers me the most;

Educational Use
Schools must ensure that when students use the Internet, their activities have an educational purpose -- class assignments, extra credit work, and perhaps some high quality enrichment activities as a reward. The more well-prepared teachers are to lead students in high quality exciting Internet-based learning activities, the more likely students will be on-task. And when students are “on-task,” problems dissipate.

My issue here is that by defining appropriate use of the internet as needing to be for educational purposes only, you geekify the integration of technology. Conversely, if we find ways to use the aspects of the internet that students gravitate to to teach the concepts from our curriculums, then we are more likely to increase the engagement level in our lessons. The statement that we should use quality enrichment activities as a reward really bothers me on a number of levels. First of all, being rewarded with high quality implies that those who are not being rewarded are not getting high quality. As a principal, I'd want to investigate this concept. Secondly, too often technology is seen as an add on, when you finish your real work, then you can use a computer for extra credit work. Again, those who subscribe to this paradigm are missing the boat. We need to be working hard to ensure that technology is being seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of learning.

In addition, I hated it when my teacher would put a whole bunch of notes on the overhead and then proceed to read them to me. I could read! Let me explore the topic on my own and create my own questions. Be there to guide my thinking. Don't be the sage on the stage, be my guide on the side. Scaffold my ideas and push me to expand my thinking. Don't lead me to the answers, teach me to ask the questions. Well-prepared teachers who lead will never be more engaging than teachers who facilitate student directed learning experiences. If I am directing my learning, then I am obviously engaged and have no reason to cause problems.

Willard's other strategies revolve around close supervision, monitoring, consequences, investigating accidental access to porn. To be frank, I see this as fear mongering. Strategies like these feed the beast that is justification for the filtering and blocking that Willard indicated was inappropriate.

What we need to do is take a hard look at why students behave. If we want them to truly be responsible and respectful digital students it has to come from within. In Diane Gossen's book "It's all about We" she quotes James Wilson as indicating that people behave for three reasons:

1. To avoid pain - What will happen to me?

2. For respect or reward from others - What will I get?

3. For respect for self - Who will I be?

The goal is to help students to ask and be able to answer question #3. Because ultimately, there is no punishment great enough to stop someone who does not care and there is no reward great enough for someone who does not care. The first two questions are agents of coercion. Coercion leaves negative legacies including guilt, resentment and conformity (among others) in its wake. Where as question number three empowers students to draw upon and evaluate their values and beliefs. In order for this to work however, we need to explicitly teach students to understand what they belief in and what they value. Not an easy task.

image from PhotoshopTalent.com

Another piece for the puzzle...

In my YouTube search on motivation, I stumbled across this video. We can use it as another piece of the being responsible and respectful digital citizens curriculum. We are going to add it to our social responsibility carousel (this will be another post) at the start of the next school year.

What are your thoughts?