Thursday, 6 February 2014


Digital Citizenship 
We are so used to seeing teachers that fear their students will abuse technology by using it for things like cyber bullying, inappropriate uses of social media, or sex-ting.  The things we can do with technology are amazing!  Look at Martha, at only 9 years old she changed what children were eating in schools. Through her blog and twitter she gathered many followers including her idol Jamie Oliver.   Her platform gave her the opportunity to be on talk shows and cooking shows.  Here they had conversations about the quality of school lunches.  She managed to change what students ate in schools making sure there was enough food and that the food was healthy.
There are many many Martha's in the world. These students are curious, confident, disciplined, self-directed, enthusiastic, passionate, critical thinkers, and problem- solvers is this not what we want to see from our students in our classrooms?  If we want to see these characteristics in our classrooms we need to allow our students to use technology productively.  My favorite question from this video is: how do we take the extra curricular and make it the curricular.  This is an excellent question and one that can be answered in numerous ways; from tweeting Chris Hatfield to ask him your questions, or skyping a country in Asia to learn more about it!  We need to focus less on controlling our students use of technology and more on empowering our students to become passionate about technology.  We need to teach students how to use technology properly rather than not using it because we are scared they will abuse it!

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