Image via Flickr Creative Commons (Stan Wiechers)

So here we are again, a few days away from the next Cohort 21 Face to Face session and here are a few of us scrambling to get out an “Action Plan” or at least some semblance of one. I won’t lie, I feel (once again) that I have let myself down a little by not posting regularly here, by not being as active on Twitter in this profile as I am in that profile and for generally well, taking a break through December. I even, you know, took a complete work holiday over Christmas (I was in Australia visiting my family and it just wasn’t conducive to getting anything done (no, not even the mind numbing 22 hours in the air!).

But that doesn’t mean I have been neglecting my Action Plan (yes, I think it needs capital letters!) – no – I’ve actually done a LOT of thinking about it and it’s changing the way I am doing (and seeing) a lot of things.

Digital citizenship is the area I am interested in exploring but it certainly is a great big world of questions out there.  As I teach Grades 3-6 only, I have chosen to make my focus those grades and, more specifically, the issue of copyright.  We hear so often about plagiarism when i comes to the use of other people’s words without permission yet every single day I see evidence of lack of knowledge about image copyright – so that’s where my focus will be.  I know myself and my limitations and I feel a small project like this where I am able to make some use-able, do-able recommendations to my colleagues is a worthy first step into the Wild West that is the land of figuring out what it means to be a good digital citizen.

So, yeah, I’ve been compiling information as I work towards that.

My Diigo list of articles I’m bookmarking about Digital Citizenship (to read and re-read)

I joined The International Society for Technology in Education and have been dipping into their excellent Webinar Archive including one called “How to make your students good digital citizens” which is on my list of things to do this week (it’s an hour long webinar and I don’t know about you all but I can’t watch something like this at work – I don’t have a classroom of my own and there are very few quiet spaces I can work uninterrupted – and when I get home, sometimes I am a little too tired to concentrate on a “work show” for long) before our session at MaRS on Friday.

I’ve enrolled in a webinar in March entitled Empowering Our Students to Be Digital Citizens) presented by Kelly Mendoza, professional developer with Common Sense Media, California – which has a whole slew of info on this topic here) because it sounded like it touched on a little of everything I need to know background-wise in order to launch into even a small-scale study.

As schools continue to integrate technology, they face increasing challenges with behavioral and ethical issues such as cyberbullying, inappropriate sharing and plagiarism. To meet these challenges, educators must teach digital citizenship, an essential digital age skill that students need to become safe, responsible and respectful participants in a digital world.

I’ve also got this huge document about the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship to wade through read as a background resource to support my thinking and then there’s Garth’s recent post about his own action plan to do with a digital citizenship curriculum which led me to a document by the Ministry of Education entitled A Shifting Landscape: Pedagogy, Technology, and the New Terrain of Innovation in a Digital World… and there goes the Internet again – being that black hole of endlessly engaging information (if you know where to look!) that it does so well…

So much info to explore and so little time but so much impact even a small amount of reading can have on one’s classroom practice and everyday life. I’m looking forward to steering my Action Plan in the right direction over the next little while. I think it’s going places  – yes, I am already thinking about what Action Plan I could do for a future Cohort 21 because you know, one thing leads to another…