Final Thoughts on Digital Citizenship
Digital citizenship is more than just being nice to others online. Digital Citizenship includes equitable access to the Internet, shopping safety, communicating online, learning and teaching others how to use technology, laws that protect creativity, rights and responsibilities, physical and emotional well-being, and safety for yourself and your devices. My biggest ah-ha moment was that any test that I create while employed by a school belongs to the school according to copyright laws.
While taking this class, I feel my greatest accomplishment was learning how to analyze a case study. I never attempted one before and at first, it seemed daunting, but I persevered and did pretty good on it. Some of the biggest challenges I faced was completing all the readings. It seems very time intensive and crazy to have a 37-page article to read for a 6 point discussion post. However, this is not my only course like this. In the summer I took 5304 and it had 3 required books to read with 2 more optional ones! What was most frustrating though, was links that were no longer active or wrong and dated articles.
My best work was my digital citizenship and social media video. When faced with the adversity of slow internet at home, I was unable to utilize the online animated video software so I had to improvise. Instead of an animated video, I recorded myself writing out what I was going to type then sped it up using iMovie. I have always wanted to try to create one of these videos. I also explored Symbaloo and used it to store my digital citizenship resources.
Applying what I have learned to my daily life is easy, especially the parts about digital health and wellness. I have recently started experiencing severe back pain and it stems from improper ergonomics when online. I have since learned to sit with proper posture and limit the time I spend on the internet. It was also interesting to learn about copyright laws, TEACH Act, and Fair Use. As an educational leader, it is important to model good digital citizenship to all educators and students.
My favorite part of the class was my weekly reflections, these helped me to organize what I learned that week and make sense of it. I would suggest to others that are looking to take this course to keep up with the readings and accomplish one part of the assignments each day. Don’t wait until the last minute to complete them!
Making the final presentation was interesting. I started with a plain Google Slide deck where I organized my thoughts and content without thinking of the aesthetics of the slides. My goal was to get everything typed up so I could copy and paste it into my chosen video making tool. When I was looking for images to use, I clicked on the explore button and it automatically took my content and insert it into different slide layouts and color choices. I had so much fun looking through the choices, I decided to stick with the slide deck and use Bitmoji for my images. I think it works great as a presentation that I can share with my teachers to help them to teach digital citizenship to our students. If I had high-speed internet at home, I probably would have tried to animate the presentation or make a video.