29
Nov

What is my job as it relates to digital citizenship?

Quickmeme.com

I began this class feeling pretty confident that I knew what to do to teach and model digital citizenship in my class. I have two classroom blogs and my own professional blog. I have a personal and a classroom Twitter account. I have a YouTube channel where I share professional, classroom and student video projects. I have presented at the IT Summit. And in the end, after taking this class, I have come to realize that I am a complete amateur!

After reading the following digital citizenship documents, it became abundantly clear that I  have a lot to learn!

But perhaps the most powerful document was the one written by the Institute for the Future about the forces of change currently at work and how that will impact the skills necessary in the future.  The skills that our students will need are drastically different than the ones I am teaching in my classroom.  Trying to make sense of our traditional reading, writing and arithmetic curriculum and the the skills necessary to function in the 21st century (particularly as articulated by IFTF) is the ultimate challenge for educators today.

“Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water… There’s no competitive advantage to knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.” Tony Wagner

And I don’t mean to say that these two curricula, if you will, are mutually exclusive.  They’re not.  I just need to re-imagine what the traditional subjects such as math and reading, should look like with the future in mind.

One of my favourite quotes is:

“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.” Rabindranath Tagore

The challenge as a teacher, is to continually be learning so that my students are not limited by what I don’t know.

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Image Source: Estrella Fugaz

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