Digital Citizenship & Twitter Chats

Digital Citizenship

The past couple weeks in ECI 201, we’ve been discussing Digital Citizenship and what it means, why it’s important, and how teachers can guide students to becoming good digital citizens. Digital Citizenship is the appropriate and responsible use of technology. This is becoming more and more important as technology is touching the lives of younger children and being brought into the classroom at younger ages. Children need to learn how to be good digital citizens to stay safe online, understand the wrong in cyber-bullying, manage their digital footprint, and many more things. A person’s digital footprint is the conglomeration of data based on the websites you visit, emails you send, and information you submit to online services that you leave behind as you search the web. Your digital footprint can say a lot about you.

Click Here for more information on Digital Citizenship

As a class, we used a tool called trace my shadow that includes a series of questions about the technology you use, the ways you access the Internet, the type of mobile device you use, and Online Services to show how many “traces” you’re leaving. It also includes tips on how to limit the number of traces and how to be safe online.

Click Here to Trace Your Shadow

This doesn’t mean that we should shy away from using technology in the classroom. As future educators, it’s important for us to teach students and their parents the importance of being safe and protected online, as well as choosing applications to use with students that aren’t going to improperly use their information. Avoiding technology as a protection strategy would only end up hurting the children, because understanding how to use technology and use it in a proper manner is a vital part of being a citizen in the 21st century. It can be tricky, but there are ways to use technology in the classroom that promote being a good Digital Citizen and still protect students online.

Twitter and PLNs 

For ECI 201, we had to create a professional Twitter account to start our Professional Learning Network (PLN). Your PLN is a great way to connect to other educators in your school, community, state, and around the world. Mr. Dayson Pasion (@MrDpasion) came to speak to our class about how he uses Twitter as a way to connect to students, parents, and other educators to strengthen his teaching and his online presence as an educator.

At first, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of using Twitter for educational purposes, because it almost seemed “cheesy” to me, but once I started following other educators and seeing the benefits for myself, I became more interested and started playing with my profile and following more accounts. For example, when I learned that I was officially accepted into the College of Education to major in Elementary Education, I tweeted about how excited I was, and I received a lot of love and support from the College of Education, my fellow education students who follow me, and other teachers around the Raleigh area that I don’t know personally, just because I used #NCSUEducation and tagged @NCStateCED in my post!

“Social Media is not about collecting likes and followers. It’s about connecting to make a difference.”

– Krissy venosdale (@krissyvenosdale)

Click Here to visit my Twitter Page!

Twitter Chats

After making our professional Twitter accounts, we were asked to participate in a Twitter chat, which is a group on Twitter you can find by a hashtag (#) and people respond to different questions and start discussions on different topics. The Twitter Chat I chose to participate in was on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm called #2PencilChat, run by Sean Farnum (@MagicPantsJones). The chat discussed the importance of giving students feedback and what that looks like in the classroom. The questions asked were:

Q1: We all know feedback is important, but when is it important to make your feedback so strong to as to give someone an award?

Q2: It’s one thing to get an award or some special recognition, but something great happens when you receive it in a ceremony. Let’s talk about the power of that!

Q3: What are your protips for giving great recognition? Talk about everything from daily feedback to major awards.

Q4: It’s good for all of your students to be feeling the love, but how do we do that without watering down our awards?

Q5: You’re nominated for an award in your school or in your #PLN, what are you nominated for?

Below is a gallery of my responses to each question, and some of the responses I got from other educators!

It was very interesting to see everyone’s responses to each questions and to get to respond to the questions myself as well. Something I learned from the Twitter Chat is that not all teachers have the same practices or same views, but there are a lot of commonalities nonetheless. This Twitter Chat allowed me to observe the opinions of educators from across the country while sitting in the comfort of my own home. I feel like I was able to connect to these educators even though I didn’t know them personally, and some of them even followed my account! Everyone was very welcoming and friendly, and it was a nice way to gauge each educator’s “classroom vibe” just through their tweet responses. This is something I would definitely like to do again because I think that seeing other educators’ practices and mindsets will help me see things that work in a classroom and things that don’t, and will better prepare me for running my classroom someday.

My Future Classroom

Now that I’ve experienced using a Twitter Account as a PLN and participating in a Twitter account, I am better equipped with ways to use more technology in the classroom! I really enjoyed participating in the Twitter Chat, so this is something I could have my students do as well, depending on the grade that I teach. Since I’m an Elementary Education major, with Elementary-level students, I could have the students help me compile tweets on an account run by me. For example, the twitter page could be called “Ms. Kaitlyn’s Class Thoughts”, and we could sit down once a week and discuss a certain topic like “How to Be a Good Leader”, and my students could tell me their opinions and what they want me to tweet. What would be really awesome is if I could get other teachers at my school to do the same thing, so we could compare our classes’ thoughts and even respond to each other! I think this would be a fun way to get students acclimated to using social media accounts like Twitter in a positive way to help them understand Digital Citizenship, even at a young age. I think it would also help the students speak up and share their thoughts more. I’m very shy, but I’m a lot more comfortable sharing my thoughts online where I’m not face-to-face, so I feel like this could help shy students speak up and share their thoughts as well. Also, this would be a great way to build community if we could interact with other classrooms at our school, and even other classrooms around the world!

Click Here to read more about the benefits of using Twitter in Elementary Schools