Tool 11

I must agree with Coach K  that safety is our number one priority with our students.  Responsible browsing is a hard concept to get across to young minds.  I think that much like other life lessons we try to gift to them from our experience only a small percentage of its importance gets through.  The best we can do is to model good choices and take precautionary measures.  Much like a discerning eye for appropriateness is the need to be able to sift through the abundance of information out there to find the “truth”.  This skill starts early and is built upon even through college.  I once had a professor that told me that he didn’t expect his students to remember more than a small percentage of what he or any other professor had taught, but that the important lesson learned from college should be to approach all situations with a scientific, rational, questioning mind.  I try to do this and we should pass this on to our students as best we can.  We can do this by requiring multiple sources for research, accepting the different viewpoints of their peers and telling them to never except anything at face value.  Lastly etiquette is an area of digital citizenship lacking greatly these days.  Anonymity has caused a great lack of it.  One of the reasons we try to emphasize choices and use positive reinforcement and conditioning in our classrooms is because we want to encourage good behavior on the inside and to advance our students morally so that they make choices based on intrinsic rewards and not fear of punishment.  In an anonymous setting such as the internet that level of morality is necessary to maintain civility.  Good digital citizenship cannot be attained otherwise.