Looking Forward

As the new calendar year approaches, I often think about how I want to change things about myself or the way I do things.  While we are not starting a new school year at this point, this time of year always makes me ask myself what I would like to see happen differently in my classroom.  Just a small example of this is that there will be a new seating chart in my classroom when we go back in one week.  But thinking a little more deeper, there are some things that I have already been working on changing within my classroom throughout this school year.
Living in such a digital and technological society and time, I have felt a great need to teach students (and teachers) about Digital Citizenship.  It seems that there are so many people (of varying ages) that don't understand the importance of being a good digital citizen.  This year in my second grade classroom, I have been giving my students specific lessons on Digital Citizenship from commonsensemedia.org  When we get back to school, we will be finishing up the second of three digital citizenship units.  As part of my DALLA project for this year, I am focusing on digital citizenship.  Once we finish our third unit, the students will be working on creating their own video about different components of digital citizenship.
Some of you might be wondering why this is so important to me and why I want to invite this as a positive change into both my classroom and my whole school site.  My school site this year was able to get 1:1 Chromebooks for every single student K - 5.  The middle school and high school in my district also by the middle of January will have 1:1 for every single student.  At the high school level, the students will be bringing their Chromebooks back and forth between home and school everyday.  So now that you know a little bit of the background, let me explain why this is so important to me.
I have seen too many people (kids and adults, and not just in the education field) that don't use proper internet etiquette, get caught into web sites/situations where they are uncomfortable, or don't understand the impact that their own digital footprint can make in the world.  It is my feeling that if we change how we teach our kids about technology, its uses, and digital citizenship, that it will begin to form easy and good habits that can follow our students throughout the rest of their lives.  The only way our society is moving is forward and the technology is going to become ever-more a part of daily life.  My hope in teaching 2nd graders about digital citizenship is that not only will they apply it in their own technology use and remember it for years to come, but that maybe some of these kids will also pass this information on to other people that they associate with in other settings.  While this change that I want to see in classrooms definitely won't happen all at once, I would like to think that by continuing this in my own class that others may eventually see the importance of keeping students readily informed on technology etiquette and digital footprints.