I always tell my students that for every ten minutes they waste texting and tweeting and checking facebook, they should take a pencil and paper and DRAW what they have experienced - no words - just images. If they turn in drawings that are obviously related to their musings online, I collect them in a box and pull out random drawings every Friday for a warm-up discussion. The kids love it. All anonymous. And it often shows how trivial teenage social networking can be!! She said, he said, love, heartbreak, fashion... in the grand scheme of things?

In our state, the Washington State Patrol has a team that comes out to the schools and talks the students about online safety I wonder if this happens in other states. I know it is very affective as i have heard that chatter when I go to the various schools at bring up the subject with the different classes.

Dan Armstrong said:

Just know that as a high school teacher I have Zero ability change their citizenship once they get in my room. They have already decided a lot of that and it is very difficult to change.

Dan, you need to give yourself more credit. You have as much ability to affect their decisions as you choose. High school students are still looking for role models...just as much as (if not more than) an elementary or middle school student. Having conversations about the topic and talking about the choices you have made are powerful tools that you have at your disposal. I imagine that you have plenty of students looking up to you...you have the ability to guide them, and you should. Incremental change...incremental change. ;)

Niki D, Great Question. I think for you the best thing you can do is show them real world examples of the results of good digital citizenship and concequences of bad citizenship. Use examples like the Triple Jumper Olympian that was removed from the games. Real world examples are the same way we teach little ones about drugs and other bad actions. If you embed in them the importance of digital citizenship then as they grow their digital learning will grow around that knowledge. Just know that as a high school teacher I have Zero ability change their citizenship once they get in my room. They have already decided a lot of that and it is very difficult to change. There is a whole world of 9-12 teachers wishing they had teachers like you preparing their upcoming student.

I believe part of this educating the parents. I think it is important to have a parent education night if at all possible (and distribute information to the parents in as many other forms as well) about the risks of children in social media. Correct me if I am wrong, but 13 is the age the they can sign a cosent for their own actions. (the online agreement for Facebook for example). Also talking to the parents about the childs ability to intrupret the written text versus the verbal. We as adults have problems with that. Its important that parents have access to their childs social media accounts. There just so many other things that I add to the conversation with parents than I am mentioning here but I think you get the point.

I have been using Edmodo to get around this problem. Students do no need an email account in order to establish an edmodo account.

I agree that this is an issue, many of my students (grades 5-8) lie about their age when they establish Facebook and other email accounts. With my 7th and 8th graders we use email quite a bit to communicate and I find that students do not know how to email, add attachments, etc and I think it is worth it to spend the time teaching them since the adult working world uses email. In order to get around the age thing I have my students that are not yet 13 establish their gmail accounts at home with their parents help, giving them permission, etc. Fot the students that don't manage to get this done at home I set up a free gaggle.net account for them. Takes time but it is worth the effort. There are so many web 2.0 tools that require an email in order to set up accounts that I find it absolutely necessary for my program. I know you can get student accounts if you are a google school but we are not quite there yet at my district.

In our district we have a discussion tool where the students have code names for the discussions but all comments do not show up until approved by the teacher. This is a great way to teach the younger students about how to post their words properly. This also opens up the discussion about "whats goes online stays online - forever".

We explain too that what ever they post in our discussions thier parents have the ability to see.

I know what you mean Nicole. I have my class using a variety of social networking tools like Edmodo. Helps them practice on task talk while using social networking tools while being able to be monitored by me. They have their own accounts, but I monitor closely and parents are also aware step by step of what we are doing. We also do a lot of talking about appropriate on line behaviour and consequences.

Great point for discussions.

Mali