Thing 11: Digital Tattoo & Digital Citizenship

Both the videos in this section were fantastic. They were well done, eye-opening, and really got me thinking about my own social media accounts in addition to my students' accounts. The second video was scary to watch - I never would have thought to compare social media privacy settings to putting your pictures out in your front lawn, leaving you front door ajar, talking to complete strangers, and letting anyone look through your stuff and/or take a copy of your photos. The little interviews with children was great - they don't realize how dangerous the internet can be.

Another eye-opening section of this unit was the article on "The Atlantic" titled "Teens are Being Bullied 'Constantly' on Instagram." I had no idea that some of these things are happening all the time. This is probably happening to some of the students I have in my own classroom. The thing that shocked me the most was students creating multiple Instagram accounts - like hate accounts where a group of students will all gang up and bully a student.

As a music teacher, I have not really addressed digital citizenship. I have a classroom rule that students cannot use they phones. Our school building rule is that no pictures or videos can be taken.

I would like to introduce an activity into one of my lesson plans. I usually have the students do a music review at some point in the school year. It is usually a written assignment, but I have been thinking about ways to "spice" up the assignment a little bit. Since a lot of concert goers and reviewers are using social media - I was thinking of having my students to go a social media concert review with pictures and/or video (If they don't have an Instagram/Facebook/Twitter - they could write it up like a newspaper/magazine article). When introducing this assignment, we could have a discussion about professional and appropriate social media use. I could also share the article "Students Guide to Personal Publishing" with them.

I feel like this is an ongoing subject. By exploring the content in this section, I feel like I'm a little bit more aware of what is going on. I will continue to research and seek out new ideas to teach/embed digital citizenship.