I listened to Penny Rayhill share her 10 tips on digital citizenship called 10 Tips for Awesome Digital Citizenship. She shared a ton of great apps and websites that you can use with your students and parents that connects to technology and digital citizenship. Here are a few of my favorites she talked about. The first one is commonsensemedia.org. This website provides articles/lessons that focus on positive digital footprints, siting sources, ways to balance technology and other activities, etc. It also is a great place for parent resources to use at home.
Two other websites, netsmartz.org and ikeepsafe.org are websites that provide videos for students that teach about internet safety, using cartoon characters. In ikeepsafe.org, the main character is a techno cat that a techno cat, that goes through some mistakes while using the internet, and kids an learn from his mistakes.
Rayhill also mentioned her favorite things to share with students to use on their own. One is called photosforclass.com. This is a site that, when you save a picture, it has image attributes on the photo itself, so you can have conversations with kids that they didn’t take the picture, but you still have to tell others how you got the picture and who took the picture. An app that she uses a lot with her students is called Shadow Puppets EDU, which is a video creation app. This app has image credits built in it’s search engine, so that when students use photos in their video, it provides a photo credits page for kids to use.
I would love to investigate more of these websites and apps, and begin to try them out with my class. I think the only way to really get a feel for sites like these sites is to use them with the students. I would love to do a lot of digital citizenship lessons at the beginning of the year, even more than I do now, and am looking forward to using these tools to help!
