Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Discussion Entry - Promoting Social Netiquette

I work at a 2 year college where during the students last term they are required to go out on an internship.  This is a very non-traditional technical school with non-traditional students. We try to explain to them anyone can "google" them or attempt to bring up their social networking pages to find out more about the students that are applying for these internships.  We have run across countless times where students have very non professional Facebook pages without having any sort of privacy setting. We need to find a way to teach them what they should and should not be posting as well as having the proper security settings for a multitude of reasons.
I am wondering should there be a class devoted solely to this? When should they learn about this and who should teach it? What have you done in your school to promote this?

2 comments:

  1. Dustin, I used to work with pre-service social studies teachers when I was a GTA at the University of Georgia. I had them both in their introductory course in the program (i.e., second semester of their sophomore year) and then during student teaching (i.e., final semester of their program). I found that during student teaching was too late to work with them on this. I always did it in that introductory course to catch them early.

    The first year I just talked about it, but the second year I had a good example to use. It had seemed that one of the students from that first year had a LiveJournal blog and had wrote some interesting (i.e., kind of unkind) things about myself and the other GTA teaching the class (and I actually discovered it while that first class was still happening). So I used to post what the student said in class to show them how easy it was to find stuff and how that stuff could affect them directly (as I did find it while the student was still in my class, and then I had them two years later in student teaching as well). It went over much better because it was someone that many of them knew or, later on, had at least heard of.

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  2. Dustin,
    I work at the middle school level, after many years of teaching high school. My thought as to when students need to learn about their digital footprint is just before or when they start leaving them. For many students that is means in elementary school.

    Digital citizenship needs to be taught in a spiral manner not in a drive-by fashion. At this point in time do students need a specific class? The answer is a resounding YES! My current school is just starting to address this issue, but I did a little surfing and found these that are more your level: Purdue Extension and Social Media Lesson Plan.

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