• Implementing the guidelines
• Supporting the guidelines
We close this chapter with a detailed look at how you manage in-school technology use once your guidelines are in place.
Advance Teams
On May 29, 1953, New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to reach the summit of Mount Everest (“Edmund Hillary,” n.d.). This was not their first visit to the region. Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance mission in 1951, which served as an advance team for his ultimate climb (“1951 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition,” n.d.). He understood that before he could make the climb, he had to better understand the environment. Whether you’re scaling mountains or transforming school or district culture, to succeed in such an undertaking requires careful, advance planning and deliberate consideration. In fact, before any great event, an advance team should perform a reconnaissance mission to survey the existing landscape.
The initial process of changing a school or district’s digital culture is twofold—(1) organize a small committee responsible for obtaining a clear understanding of the goals and (2) investigate the existing policy to determine gaps. For instance, because schools and districts are required to provide reasonable care, the infrastructure blocks many of the policy elements identified as inappropriate or unacceptable when the user connects to the network. However, outside school, when the user connects to his or her personal network, no such restrictions apply. The nature and structure of many acceptable use policies mean they only apply at school and lack the holistic nature that would see users applying the principles in all aspects of their lives.
Effecting this kind of critical cultural change requires a clear vision and input from the various community stakeholders, including staff, parents, students, and school trustees. Establishing an advance team to gain input from the entire community is valuable because it aligns all stakeholder groups. Because large groups often function as a committee from which little emerges, the team should be small with members who are engaged in and motivated by the task. Team members should be early adopters who see the benefits and significance of changes. Often, advance teams develop a champion, who becomes the public face of the change.
Given all of this, what does a better acceptable use policy look like? That’s what we look at in the rest of this chapter, beginning with gaining a better understanding of a policy’s purpose.
Purpose
When setting out to establish your school’s purpose, you must understand what digital citizenship outcomes you want to achieve. These goals should reflect the purpose of education—to prepare young people for life beyond school and enable them to be contributing and valuable citizens.
Consider the approaches taken in various international school systems. In the Australian Curriculum (n.d.a), “Capability encompasses knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions. Students develop capability when they apply knowledge and skills confidently, effectively and appropriately in complex and changing circumstances, in their learning at school and in their lives outside school.”
In the New Zealand Curriculum, “Key competencies are the capabilities people have, and need to develop, to live and learn today and in the future” (Te Kete Ipurangi, 2014).
In the International Baccalaureate (IB, 2015) curriculum, “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”
Notice that each of these curricula establishes the importance of preparing young minds for life after schooling. They focus not only on learning but also on citizenship. This is not by accident. In designing a curriculum and acceptable technology use guidelines that go hand in hand to enhance both student learning and digital citizenship, it helps to use a tool like the one in figure 1.1 to analyze where you are and where you want to go.
Figure 1.1: Digital citizenship analysis tool.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/technology for a free reproducible version of this figure.
By using a tool such as this one, you should begin to develop an understanding of your school’s strengths and weaknesses with regard to developing your students into good digital citizens.
Because educators have long-term goals for students beyond school, they must develop students’ skills and behaviors not only to prepare them for life but also to enable them to be contributing and functional members of society. Developing a suitable digital citizenship foundation is a key objective and aspirational goal for educators in an increasingly digital world. Well-thought-out and ethically based acceptable use guidelines based on the tenets of digital citizenship can help facilitate that preparation.
Traditional acceptable use agreements aren’t really agreements, and we do not refer to them as such in this book. They are based on defined policies that are often limiting, inflexible, and compliance focused. Ethically based digital citizenship agreements instead offer guidelines that the community develops and agrees to that are encompassing and adaptable and focus on the learner’s ethical and moral development. Table 1.1 lists some of the traits most common to these agreements.
Table 1.1: Comparing Traditional Acceptable Use Policies and Ethically Based Digital Citizenship Guidelines
| Traditional Acceptable Use Policies | Ethically Based Digital Citizenship Guidelines |
| Applicable only to school environment | Applicable to all aspects of life; holistic |
| Specific and restrictive | Encompassing |
| Focused on compliance | Focused on ethics |
| Inflexible | Adaptable |
| Struggles to deal with new and emerging technologies, behaviors, and trends | Able to deal with new technologies, behaviors, and trends |
| Requires frequent updates | Requires seldom updates |
| Often written in legal or quasi-legal language making them hard to understand, particularly for younger students | Written for the specific age group, using age-appropriate language |
| Often one agreement for all student ages | Separate agreements that reflect students’ ages |
| Complex and lacking clarity | Clear and understandable |
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/technology for a free reproducible version of this table.
Once you establish the purpose for your digital citizenship guidelines, it’s equally important to ensure its language is clear to the intended audience.
Clarity
Many have the experience of installing software and then being asked to agree to the end user license agreement (EULA). Written in a legal language, these documents are long, dull, and often