Digital Citizenship - conditions may apply

"If the internet has taught us anything, it is that people will sign up to just about anything as long as it is free. And if the price we pay for things we like is loss of privacy, it's a price many many of us are happy to pay." Matt Egan - Macworld, August 2014.

Knowing this I'm concerned about the consequences of the actions online by my students and my own children. They don't really seem to care - they're adolescents - and perhaps shouldn't have to, but due to the circumstances they grow up with, they will have to. They need to know and learn what the consequence of their online behavior can be in order to take action if they want to. That's a decision of their own, but we cannot let them grow up not knowing. And who is or should be the designated person to do that? I thought so ... Teachers and since school is a learning institute, why not learn the new basics and put this in the curriculum? In my opinion digital citizenship should be a mandatory course or subject taught in school.

I've shared with you about the new subject and creating global learners at my school in another blog post. This is sort of part two, but I'm not satisfied with this yet. The world around keeps changing very fast and I (and the students?) need to keep up and share my knowledge with them. My students will learn mainly about the positive things social media can bring, but also about the downside and dangers such as sexting, grooming, identity theft, online harassment, addiction. They need to be aware of things, because I'm also asking to create and use their accounts on multiple social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Google and Prezi. Whilst asking them to use these online tools for learning, they need to know about the downside of those online tools and their digital footprint ... or better; digital tattoo. Footprints can be removed, but to remove tattoos is very hard. Content that has shared online, will always be there and for certain instates and companies to find.

Conditions may apply, because when using your television, reading a book or calling someone on the telephone using a landline is quite harmless. But now since we're using smartphones and social media, all our online actions are recorded and traced ... and they could bite us in the ass a few years from now. Students need to know and be aware. 'Think again and be prepared' as Jello Biafra use to say.

Movie to watch: 'Terms and Conditions may apply' (2013)
Google Digital Citizenship Course: http://www.google.com/edu/teachers/youtube/curric/

World Citizenship

Since a few years I'm teaching this subject in the second class at my secondary school besides geography and economics. There's no standardized curriculum and there are no basic (stated as mandatory by the government) goals with this elective subject. That means that me and my colleagues can pick whatever we think that'll fit within the region of this world citizenship thing. 

During the Global SEE Summit in Calgary I prepared the questions for the twitter chat with Rafranz Davis and the topic was Global Awareness and I guess that covers in my opinion the new subject I teach: World Citizenship (mondo as it's called at my school in the Netherlands). These were the main questions that we asked during the twitter chat: 

- How can we create lessons that better prepare kids to be globally prepared?

- What do you think is most important to teach concerning world citizenship?

- How do we maintain global awareness in learning?

During this twitter chat we tried to get ourselves and other teachers to think about these questions and come up with some answers. Even for us as teachers we need to be an example for our students and therefore it's almost mandatory that we add some global awareness to the curriculum. Wouldn't you agree? Especially with the state of the world at this moment, such as the airplane with civilians shot from the air above Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, civil war in Syria, conflict between the Israeli and the Palestine people, Russia and it's foreign policy, Global Warming, Ebola virus in Africa, child and slave labour during sports tournaments such as the Olympics and World Championships, natural disasters in China and so on.
Due to the amount of information and access to this information, students get faced with too many different views. In that case it's importend that a trustworthy and reliable person as the teacher is able to help his students to verify and narrow down these information stream, in order to let the student be able to create an opinion of their own.

Global Awareness: people nowadays need to be aware and know at least something about it, to create an opinion of their own on these matters. Since the internet the world is connected and it's not about our own street, city or community anymore. From this point of view I think that we need to get our students globally connected. I know that I will. Not only during this new subject I teach, but also in my standardized curriculum with geography and economics. I've got a few plans to connect my classroom with school classes in New Brunswick-Canada, Novosibirsk-Russia, Rakovnik-Czech Republic, Orland Park/USA and am trying to connect to Kenya-Africa. With the classes that I teach about global citizenship we'll be joining the Global Teenager Project again and will connect with schools in Surinam, Curaçao and hopefully many more. 

This week I was asked if digital citizenship should be part of this world citizenship. I think yes, and will blog about that later this week. And would like if you shared your opinion as well. 

Getting connected with Rafranz Davis from Texas, US.

Association for Citizenship Teaching (UK): http://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk

Wereldburgerschap - kennisplatform voor mondiaal onderwijs: http://www.wereldburgerschap.nl

Canon voor wereldburgerschap/Canon for Global Citizenship: http://www.ncdo.nl/artikel/canon-voor-wereldburgerschap (UK & NL)

Global SEE Summit #smartee Twitter Chat

While at the Global SEE Summit in Calgary, Alberta two weeks ago Rafranz hosted a Twitter Chat. It was the first one that most of the attendants were in the same room while tweeting and sharing their thoughts on the questions. Last week the NA SMART Exemplary Educators did a Twitter chat and the topic was the Global SEE Summit. And this was really helping us SEEs from #SummitWithdrawals ... We all miss the summit a lot and weren't finished at all.

Rafranz created the question to review the Global summit and shared the questions with me afterwards, in order to do the same in our time zone. The North American Twitter chat was at 3 AM CEST and there weren't that many EMEA SEEs attending. So Bryony (SEE from Schotland) and I thought that we might give it a go this week with the same questions.

• Q1 We all accomplished quite a bit last week both personally and professionally. What was your greatest #smartee accomplishment?
• Q2 What one new thing did you learn about SMART NB or Amp that you can share? (nothing under NDA) #smartee
• Q3 We all made global classroom connections last week. How will you realistically get and keep your classrooms globally connected? #smartee
• Q4 What is your one big thing that you will implement right away because of the Summit? #smartee
• Q5 Share one thing that you learned from an international friend! #smartee
• Q6 If you could change or improve one thing last week, what would it be? #smartee
• Q7 What would you like to say to someone who made a great impact on your life last week? #smartee

And before we started the Twitter chat, we did some housekeeping. Nothing NDA should be shared, because we signed that agreement for the Summit and when answering a question, people should respond using the number of the question in their tweet. The questions will start with a Q followed by the number. Answers should begin with A followed by the number of question you’re answering.
The twitter chat was from 7 till 8 PM CEST, but it took at least 15 minutes more. People were enthusiastic. And before we even could start with question number 1, the chat was already running on another topic: world citizenship, digital citizenship, digital footprint, digital tattoo and what should or could be taught in that curriculum. Very nice topic and would like to do a tweet chat about that topic.

The tweets are captured in this Storify. And tweeting from tweetchat.com is very useful during a Twitter Chat, because it automatically adds the hashtag that's been used.

P.S. I would like to thank Rafranz for sharing the questions and Bryony for doing a great job hosting the Twitter chat with me! Thanks.

SMART Exemplary Educators Summit Tiger

The past few years I've had the honor and the pleasure to attend three different SMART Exemplary Educator Summits and if you count the precursor The International SMART Board forum along, than I've attended in total four professional development training camps organized by SMART Technologies in a foreign country.

My first official summit was in the summer of 2011 at the headquarters in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) and I was invited to come over and have a look at how the North-Americans did run a show like that, because together with 5 other SEEs from Europe we were going to be the peer mentors at the EMEA SEE Summit in Hamburg (or Paris) the next year. At this summit there were also about 50 SEEs from Canada and the US. This Summit was (perhaps due to the fact that it was way out of my time zone in the beautiful country of Canada) epic to me. I've learned so much and gained so many friends. My love for SMART gained a boost and was ready to adopt more technology in my classroom. This was also the start of my first global collaboration project with teachers from abroad.

Class of 2011

My second summit that I attended was in Hamburg at the local SMART office during the summer of 2012. There we're about 30 SEEs from EMEA and four from North-America (3 from the US and one from Canada) to learn from and share with each other. This Summit took only three days of professional development and I did two presentations. New friends were made and old friends were reunited again. New global collaboration projects started from here.

Class of 2012

My third summit was in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) again. The summit was a global one, therefore there were about 76 SEEs present. SEEs from Canada, the US, EMEA and Panama, Chile and Mexico. This was the one that was most epic. Different from the other ones, and I've made even more new friends and was (at last?) reunited with old friends as well. Whilst putting this words down, I'm still suffering from summit withdrawals. I'm missing my fellow SEEs and want to work even more with them. Global collaboration will be taken to a next level ...

Class of 2014

Besides the locations, amount of SEEs that attended and the latest software releases at the moment of the summits, there were some differences between them. I'll try to share my opinion on that. 

At first in my opinion we did less sharing at the latest summit, compared to the other two that I attended. All SEEs needed to prepare and bring their best lesson to the 2011 and 2012 summit and needed to show and share in smaller groups. That is definitely something I've missed during the global summit. The amount of technical details was merely the same, although was the focus on this summit of course on amp and less on Notebook. New were the hackathons and the sessions we did with the developers. That is a great benefit from the other summits I've attended. We could share our feature requests etc. directly with the developers and could actually see that a lot things were put right into action. We all loved that! Watch out for the new releases of amp and Notebook! This was also the first year that the Global SEE platform was a great part of it, which made people do and share things on that platform. As I already stated before ... after the last summit I'm suffering more from summit withdrawals, so I guess it's addictive and I need to be with my fellow SEEs more and more again. There!

EMEA and Global Summit compared