"Ms. Ellis, It's Just Like the Show Catfish!"

This week has been so busy! I just hate 4-day weeks because there's so much to do with so little time. Well one of our poor teachers was sick this week. I felt so bad, but she's back to feeling better. She had a sub and I was asked to help the sub at the end of the day. I tried to think of an activity that would keep the students engaged for the rest of the day (2 hours!). I had been looking into the 1:1 digital citizenship lessons from www.commonsensemedia.org.  The first lesson for 6th grade was taking a look at the Acceptable Use Policy. So I hurried downstairs to grab some copies and headed into a 6th grade class that looked like they were ready to eat me alive with a paper full of small words with major meaning. I explained to them the purpose of the lesson and the desired outcome. The desired outcome was that each student or group of students would create a kid friendly iMovie explaining the guidelines of our district's AUP.

I expected to get through the AUP in 30 minutes. OMG! The students were so engaged and couldn't believe the guidelines that were in the AUP. They were in shock. They were making some major connections. Then we reached the rule of not falsely representing yourself. The students talked about being able to "hide" behind a screen on Facebook which leads to internet bullying and fights, pretending to be a different age, and one student took it to that unexpected high in any lesson. "Ms. Ellis, it's just like the show catfish on MTV." That's when I knew they understood! She talked about how that show can ruin peoples lives and they told me to watch it that night. Ummm, weird show and it's kind of scary!

Their ability to make connections to those guidelines and see all of the expectations of them even though they have their own iPad really opened their eyes to their connection to the world right at their fingertips. What really hit home is when they truly understood that they have no privacy. Once you put it out there on the internet, blog, Edmodo for people to see, you can't always take it back. They were blow away that even I, as a district employee, have to follow the guidelines just like them.

I can't wait to keep working with this class on digital citizenship. One student told me "Ms. Ellis, you should send our iMovies somewhere." So my district's Director of IT has no idea, but I will soon be blowing up his email with AUP iMovies (guess, I will warn him by sending him this blog post ha!).

We have to take a different approach then telling students what they shouldn't do on their iPad and they have no idea why it important or for their safety. That only makes them want to "test the waters."  I really think that one lesson went a long way with those 6th graders. Many people think that digital citizenship shouldn't be taught and that you address is as it comes up but sometimes when it comes up, it's too late and being too late can bring you to a bad episode of Catfish! Check out an episode below.

http://bit.ly/MTVsCatfish