Monday, February 6, 2012

Introducing A New DCA


We've spent a good deal of time this year working on creating a meaningful Digital Citizenship Agreement (which I blogged about here).  In rolling this new agreement out to students we wanted to get them thinking about and talking about some of the themes and their meanings and applications.  We split our 230 students into two groups; our amazing librarian took the grades 11 and 12 while I took the 9s and 10s.  We first introduced the idea through a short presentation(embedded in this post - hopefully I was more engaging in the live version)  that was meant to emphasize the powerful tools available to all of us and the importance of community norms and positive behavior.  Then advisors led their small groups of 12 students through a discussion using the following prompts:
Prompt 1: How do you respect yourself and others in your digital life?  Why is this important? Why is the school concerned about this?

Prompt 2: - How do you respect property and intellectual property in your digital life? Why is this important?  


Prompt 3: - How do you protect yourself and others in your digital life? Can you share an example? Why is the school concerned about this?


As expected there was some push back by students regarding why these things were the school's business, but overall the discussions went well and students were able to speak about the themes and listen to the ideas of others.  Our goal was to raise awareness and get students sharing and thinking about these topics - this we achieved.  Additionally the next day all students signed the agreement in their advisories.  We had a follow up session a few months later that was also well received by students.  This is a good start, but what do we do next?