Twitter can be a very useful tool for keeping up with current news articles and trends in education. Recently, through a link posted on the Edudemic Twitter feed, I found an article entitled "The Teacher's Guide to Digital Citizenship." This article outlines a new curriculum introduced by Microsoft, which addresses issues of copyrighted material, intellectual property, plagiarism, and ethics in media in a digital age. The article walks through the units of the curriculum and explains the various discussion topics and projects which are intended to drive home the need for responsible use of digital media.
The article was highly informative because it offers some very practical advice and ideas on how to talk with students about their responsibility to respect copy written material and the intellectual property of others that is made widely available to them through the Internet. Although I have listened to many lectures on plagiarism, copy written material, and intellectual property throughout my undergraduate education, it is often easy to forget that younger students, who have grown up with file sharing most if not all of their lives, may not understand the implications of these concepts in the digital age. The necessity for a thorough education in digital citizenship for all students is ever growing. If we do not educate our students on the responsibility they have as consumers and producers of digital media to respect the property of others and protect their own property and ideas, we cannot expect them to understand the value of any of the artifacts including music, images, video, written material, software, or games that they encounter online. A link to the article is located at the bottom of the page.
Edudemic offers articles that cover many topics in education and I have found their Twitter feed to be particularly interesting. It was hard to choose a single article to focus on for the purpose of this blog entry. In general, I have found Twitter to be a very useful tool for accessing distilled news stories and information. It is even more convenient that all this information is located in one place. The word limit means that, as a reader, you can see a snapshot of an article including a headline and you can decide whether it interests you or not. Twitter is definitely a useful tool for educators to keep up with all things relevant to education.
I retweeted the article here: https://twitter.com/RachelSwain5
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/Edudemic
http://edudemic.com/2012/10/teachers-guide-digital-citizenship/
I agree that teaching about Digital Citizenship is critical. I even see educators that don't follow proper form and cite resources for images, etc. that they find on the Internet. Thanks for sharing this resource.
ReplyDeleteBe sure to go back and add a link to your Twitter feed!