Digital Citizenship

Highlights of Weeks Readings

What is an Acceptable Use Policy?
Acceptable Use Policies ensure that school computers are being used in a safe, relevant and appropriate manner. Schools AUPs serves as a legal document, it should be complete, adaptable. be unique to their school, protect students, and inform parents.

Cornell University Library
Listed five criteria for evaluating Web pages:
Accuracy: Does the website list an author and a way to contact them
Authority: Does the website have the author’s credentials
Objectivity: Does the website have accurate information
Currency: Is the page is current and updated
Coverage: Is the website free or do you have pay fees to access it

Best search engines
I also liked this page it had the best search for your information needed. It broke it down into different categories by what the student was looking for and the best search engines to find the information. Some examples:
I need help to define my topic
I need to find quality results...
I need to do research in a specific discipline...
The timeliness of information that I need is..
I need facts…
I need perspectives and opinions...

Group Meetings
This week we met twice. Our first meeting we discussed digital citizenship and the effects it has on teachers and our schools. We discussed the necessity of implementing AUP’s in schools. We said that censorship is necessary but it does come with limitations. We also talked about blogging and how some schools are strict with blogging because of who can access the student’s blog and write back to them. Schools are also limiting what sites teachers can look at. They are even recording what sites they are using and using this information to dismiss some teachers who are using the Internet inappropriately. We felt that this is restricting because they are limiting the websites that teachers can use as tools to aid them in the classroom.
During the meeting Dr. S met with us and suggested that instead of using GTalk we use WizIQ because it would give us a better experience because it was more like Elluminate Live. During the meeting we all signed up for a WizIQ account.
Our second meeting we finished our discussion on Digital Citizenship. We also started our group Wiki. Lindsay set up the main page of our Wiki. We suggested ideas of what to put up such as pictures.