Digital Citizenship Week and Cyber Security Awareness Month

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Digital Citizenship Week is also in October, October 15-19.

These are some resources that can be used by students, employees, and parents to help promote and gain a better understanding of cyber security and digital citizenship.

Digital Citizenship Week - October 15-19
The first place to start for digital citizenship is Common Sense Media. CSM provides a free K-12 digital citizenship curriculum that can be integrated in the classroom or computer lab.

Check out the "4 Ways to Get Started Teaching Digital Citizenship" resource. You will need to create a CSM account in order to access the suggested resources.

You can encourage parents to take part in Digital Citizenship Week by taking the #DeviceFreeDinner challenge and/or sharing family engagement resources from Common Sense Media.

For elementary students, include one of these books during read aloud time to help discuss digital citizenship.

For secondary students, you can discuss ways to check facts online. Use this article from ISTE to help you get started.

For teachers on Twitter, search for #DigCit and connect with other educators discussing digital citizenship.


Cyber Security Awareness Month

2018 is the 15th year for Cyber Security Awareness Month. This month's overarching theme is "Cybersecurity is our shared responsibility and we all must work together to improve our Nation’s cybersecurity.".

Department of Homeland Security provides Cyber Security resources for K-12 classrooms. Check out Be Cyber Smart.

For parents and employees, check out the good online safety habits from STOP, THINK, CONNECT. These habits include:

- keep a clean machine
- protect your personal information
- connect with care
- be web wise
- be a good online citizen
- own your online presence


How are you promoting and/or teaching about cyber security and digital citizenship this month? Share your ideas with us!

Digital Citizenship 101

Are you part of the 46% of smartphone owners who can't live without their device?
Do you spend the majority of your day in front of a screen?
Are you one of the 17.6 million US residents that experienced identity theft in 2014?

Without digital citizenship as a part of K-12 education and beyond, the answers to the above questions will become more and more alarming!

There was several resources out there to help educators with discussing the multiple areas of digital citizenship with students of all ages.

Common Sense Media
This is probably my most favorite digital citizenship resource for K-12 educators.  CSM provides a free K-12 curriculum for educators. The lessons are divided into grade levels and units. Each lesson is approximately 45 minutes, but can be divided into small chucks with ease.  I love how everything is right there for you. You don't have to feel nervous about discussing the topics, because of how CSM has it laid out for you.  There are also several digital resources available as well as student and parent resources in multiple languages.

InCtrl
These lessons are geared toward 4th - 8th grade.  There are lesson plans and video resources available for teachers and students.

ConnectSafely
This is a great resource for parents and teachers.  This site has great resources, blog posts, and suggestions on all things digital.  I had the chance to hear Kerry Gallagher at FETC, which drew me to this resource.

Classroom Read Alouds
I came across this blog post that talked about digital citizenship read alouds.  Ten minutes later I found several other books you can use to discuss various digital citizenship topics with students in both lower and upper elementary.

Some of the books include:
Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droyd
If You Give a Mouse an iPhone, by Ann Droyd
Webster's Email, by Hannah Whaley
Webster's Friend, by Hannah Whaley
The Pirates of Plagiarism, by Lisa Downey
Bully, by Patricia Polacco

There are also resources out there for you, the educator!  If you have on Twitter, do a search for #digcit. This is a a great hashtag related to all this digital citizenship.  You also want to check out Susan Bearden's book, Digital Citizenship. These two resources are a great start to learning more and becoming more familiar with digital citizenship.

Do you have a great resource, share with us here!

Everything online is NOT true!

Have you come across this image in your Facebook feed?  This was something I saw shared more than once around Jan 1st and Jan 2nd.  People were sharing this image, thinking "how cool is this", without realizing 1-1-2017 was on a Sunday.  It's so easy to click "share" that we forget to use common sense sometimes.

Children and adults are presented with mountains of information on a daily basis. From the news to our social media feeds to our friends and family, information is everywhere.  Some many people (children and adults) have gotten into the "It's online, so it must be true" mindset, that images like the one above is shared and liked without doing a simply check on the calendar.

We have to teach our students (and ourselves) how to determine what is true and what isn't online.

Three Great Places to Start
The first place teachers can go to find some great critical evaluation, is at Kathy Schrock's Critical Evaluation website. This website provides some great resources and information teachers can use to better prepare themselves and their students when it comes to evaluating information online.

A second resource teachers should check out is November Learning.  Alan November provides some great resources for teachers on information literacy.

Of course the Digital Citizenship Curriculum by Common Sense Media provides lessons for grades K-12 that include evaluating information online. These are a must in every classroom!

Four Answer Worthy Questions
(1) Does the website have an author and/or publisher?
(2) What is the URL?
(3) Is the information current?
(4) Is the information reliable?

The four questions above are a great checklist when evaluating websites and the information they contain.

Does the website have an author and/or publisher?
You want to find the author and/or publisher of a website. Is the author and/or publisher a reliable source? Don't think just because you find the author's name that the information is reliable.

What is the URL?
The extension of a URL can tell you alot!  Extensions like .edu (education) and .gov (government) are for specific groups. Extensions like .com (companies) and .org (non-profit) can be purchased by anyone.

Is the information current?
Look for a date. When was the information posted, updated, or created?

Is the information reliable?
As you read the information, think about the author's purpose.  Are they trying to sell you something or push you toward one view vs another?  Also, try to find the same information on a different site. This will help you cross reference the information.

Being a critical evaluator of websites and information can help ensure you are not sharing images like the one so many did just a few days ago!

Do you have any resources you use to evaluate websites?  Share your resources with us!

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Digital Citizenship Week

Next week is Digital Citizenship Week.  Although this topic should be taught 24/7, we can use next week to stress the importance to education stakeholders like parents and community members. 

If you do a Google search for digital citizenship resources, you will come up with some great resources! Below are some I have shared with fellow educators.

The number 1 resource is Common Sense Media! If you have never explored the Common Sense Media website, stop right now and check them out! CSM offers a free, K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum. The lessons are 45 minutes each and provide teachers with a guide for how to discuss the topics in the classroom. The curriculum is constantly evolving to include resources in multiple languages and meet the various standards. The lessons focus on 8 topics:

~ Internet Safety
~ Privacy & Security
~ Relationships & Communication
~ Cyberbullying & Digital Drama
~ Digital Footprint & Reputation
~ Self-Image & Identity
~ Information Literacy
~ Creative Credit & Copyright

Another resource I came across this week is iKEEPSAFE. This is a resource I will explore more for sure! Click on the "educators" section to find PD and curriculum resources for K-12.

Teaching Digital Citizenship is another resource I have found that provides lessons for grades 4-8 on the following topics:
~ Communication & Collaboration
~ Digital Citizenship
~ Privacy
~ Media Literacy
~ Cyberbullying
~Ethics/Copyright
~ Information Literacy

If you are in search of a game, check out Webonauts Internet Academy from PBS. Common Sense Media also have some great online learning resources for students in grades 3 and above.

Edutopia and  Edudemic also provide a list of resources K-12 teachers can use to discuss digital citizenship in the classroom next week!

Do you have any digital citizenship resources you plan to use next week? Share them with us!