1. Safety, safety, safety! Don't put personal information out there without talking to your parents! Safety is such a key with students when talking about the online world! Many elementary students just aren't mature enough to think through the consequences of their online actions and need parental help.
2. Kindness and Respect - Being nice and showing respect to people and to devices and equipment. One of my pet peeves is when students come into the library or classroom computers and change the settings to their own personal preferences. With the exception of students who have disabilities and need to change settings, I do not allow this. We talk about this and the importance of respecting the property of our school.
3. Responsibility - How to give credit where credit is due for information found online that is used in projects and presentations. With lots of freedom, comes lots of responsibility. I try to teach students to make good choices and of course, cite sources!
Two years ago all of the district librarians were given the task of teaching digital citizenship to all of our students. We have the iSafe curriculum as a starting point, but I also use BrainPop and other web resources. One of our fabulous district librarians created flipcharts for teaching Internet safety that include the iSafe curriculum as well as other resources. Last year the district included teachers in the "teaching Digital Citizenship" requirement. This is key! Students will learn so much more about what is the right thing to do when it comes to digital citizenship if all of us (the whole staff) are giving them the expectations of being a good digital citizen.
Explaining Digital Citizenship to parents is very important as well. One of my goals for this year is to submit some articles to our PTA newletter and hopefully make a brief presentation at a PTA meeting explaining digital citizenship and what we are teaching regarding digital citizenship at school.
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