I began by searching some of the main blogs that I follow on the topic, as I find these to be the most practical in terms of providing links to things I can use right away with my students.
Both of these posts, by Mary Beth Hertz, have practical suggestions for ways to introduce both social skills and research skills online to younger students. Since one of my main questions is how to effectively reach elementary-age students and engage them on the topic, I look forward to reading more posts by this author on what strategies worked for her.
This post also outlines some ways to start the conversation on digital citizenship with your students, which is an important first step before actually teaching it; students need to know what it is and why it is important.
Edutopia is one of my top Twitter accounts to follow, as there are thousands of blog posts and articles on relevant and interesting ways to incorporate technology in the classroom.
I soon realized that I could spend hours looking at different ideas just on Edutopia, but that is certainly encouraging for further research! After seeing how much great stuff is simply just online, I decided to open up my Delicious account (which I had forgotten about!) and start keeping track of the links I was finding. A bit of an "ah-ha!" moment as that is exactly what I have told students to do in the past- keep track of your links!
Another blog that has been useful in the past is Richard Byrne's Free Teach for Teachers. He has numerous posts on ways to use online tools in the classroom. This one had a comprehensive list of resources for varying grade levels on teaching about ethical online behaviour:
12 Good Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship. If you are searching for a similar topic, I would recommend this post!
Another resource that I hope to explore and possibly use this year is Passport to the Internet, an online tutorial for digital citizenship for grades 4-8. A colleague used it with all intermediate classes at her school and she said it was quite successful in getting kids thinking more about their online presence.
Academic Journal Search:
I then spent some time searching for journal articles through UBC library, in order to get some literature on the "why" we teach digital citizenship and perhaps see some in-depth case studies.
- Young, D. (2014). A 21st-century model for teaching digital citizenship. Educational Horizons, 92(3), 9-12.
The author of this article teaches an entire course on digital citizenship and discusses the issue of students being digital natives but not necessarily skilled how to use these tools properly. She offers an outline of her course and some links to teaching ideas.
Landreau, J. (2011). Research: Why wait till high school? introducing elementary students to research skills makes their learning more active and pays off by deepening and improving their abilities over time. Phi Delta Kappan, 92(6), 55.
This article illustrates the benefits of starting to teach the research process as early as possible so that students are used to it and don't "dread" it by the time they reach high school. An article like this could certainly be used to encourage teachers to collaborate with the TL on that front.
After this initial research session, I am seeing that my keywords are very broad- I have information literacy and research skills, in addition to digital citizenship and online safety. While these are all certainly connected, there are different issues related to both. I'll continue my research and see which aspects I lean toward investigating more...
Well done research! You are definitely on the right track and these early results show that there is quite a bit of good stuff out there to explore and utilize. I was impressed with your ability to leverage your existing social networks and to implement and utilize tools like delicious. I followed your delicious account and also recommend you setup a IFTTT.com recipe (If This, Then That) which is an automated service to save any link I favorite or tweet onto my delicious feed. Its a great way to automatically curate resources that you find on twitter. Overall, you are doing a great job on your reading review and will have a good set of resources to carry you through the rest of the class.
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