Raising Responsible Digital Citizens: A Workshop for Parents

Raising Responsible Digital CitizensThe following workshop has been developed for parents as an informative and interactive companion to the CODE Parent Toolkit. It can be delivered by members of a school as a face to face group parent engagement strategy or as a stand alone activity for parents to work through on their own either at home or at school locations where a parent area, lounge, or lending library has been established.

Ultimately, this resource has been developed to accompany and support the CODE Parent Toolkit embedded below. Each strategy presented in the guide is represented with a practical web-based counterpart / activity. Each activity lends itself perfectly to starting and maintaining those all important conversations between parent and child. The conversations created though these activities will help to provide the respect and comfort that is necessary for meaningful dialogue and reflection on both physical and virtual identities.

The goal is to provide parents and guardians with tips, tricks, and strategies en route to understanding their own digital footprint and how they work with their children to understand theirs.

Audience: Parents and Guardians of Children 10+

The Rationale / Description: Our global society has changed how students find, access, and use information. Collaborating online and sharing information is a skill that needs to be nurtured. Information on the Internet is vast but it can also be overwhelming. How do you filter all of the information that is available and how do you determine what is good and what is not? Further, how much information are you providing online and how does it represent you?

Explore how to use and share information on the Internet while protecting the privacy of you and your children in the process. In today’s complex physical and virtual world it is becoming increasingly necessary that children and adults alike understand their digital identity so as to ensure that it is a true representation of the real-life physical self. This workshop is designed to provide tips, tricks, and strategies for ensuring a basic understanding of the digital world and strategies for working with your tweens and teens at home.

Presentation Framework: The framework of this presentation and workshop is the CODE (The Council of Ontario Directors of Education ) Parent Toolkit (specifically pages 32-37). The activities within are intended to spark conversations between parent and child so as to develop a relationship and culture of trust. The activities provide the foundation with which to ask those all important open-ended questions that start a conversation rather than one-word answers. For example, the Reppler website (http://www.reppler.com) is a social media monitoring service designed to help users manage their online image across different social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). It does so by showing users how they are perceived across social networks, by telling users the makeup of their social network connections, and by identifying any potential issues and risks. By its very nature, the service provides a snapshot of use which is perfect for conversations between parent and child.

Currently, the presentation is designed to be presented in person. Coming Soon, I plan on posting a script and user guide that can be utilized in a stand-alone / on-demand environment.

The CODE Parent Toolkit

The Presentation

Web Resources

Reppler: http://www.reppler.com

Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts

Socioclean: http://socioclean.com/

StatusCloud: http://statuscloud.icodeforlove.com/?ref=nf

Please offer comments in the space below and I will be sure to answer. I will also be posting suggestions for using this resource in a variety of learning environments.