Many of the acceptable use policies schools use are similar. In an effort to protect the school or district from potential legal challenges, lawyers often write these policies in such a manner that is unsuitable for the target audience—the students. Students sign them, because without agreeing to the document, they will not have access to the computers and online resources needed to complete their work. Unfortunately, even if the document’s terms were negotiable, they either don’t understand or don’t take the time to read these documents; it’s all too hard for them.
Consider this challenge: take your school’s acceptable use policy and copy the text into either the SMOG (simplified measure of gobbledygook) Calculator readability index (http://bit.ly/2sjLgPq) or the Lexile Framework for Reading (www.lexile.com/analyzer). How readable is your agreement? If you are unfamiliar with these tools, we talk more about them in the Student Buy-In section in chapter 5 (page 76).
As you interpret the results from a readability analysis tool, consider the following questions and what they say about your digital citizenship agreement’s language.
• Who is your digital citizenship agreement written for? Is the agreement a document the students can use and understand, or is it written to safeguard the school or district from potential litigation?
• How readable is your digital citizenship agreement? Does it suit the target audience’s needs?
• Do you have specific agreements for different age groups? Is the language of the agreement suitable for the target audience?
If you can’t satisfactorily answer these questions, you need to continue to re-evaluate the language you use in your digital citizenship agreements. Once you’ve done that, you can start to consider the rationale behind each guideline in the agreement and whether it is justified.
Rationale
Both acceptable use policies and digital citizenship agreements often make statements about what a young person should or should not do online. These well-intended and applicable statements often miss a critical element—the rationale for their existence. In designing guidelines for students, educators, and parents, we believe it’s critical to justify each guideline with a compelling case that supports each statement in age-appropriate terms. If you cannot justify and support a guideline, do not include it.
Since one of the goals of digital citizenship agreements is to apply each of their guidelines across all aspects of life, students are unlikely to adopt guidelines that their homes cannot also support. Although students may adhere to restrictive policy agreements at school, where there is a degree of supervision and monitoring, they are likely to ignore them for the other eighteen hours of the day when they are no longer in the learning environment. Ethically driven guidelines, however, stay with students no matter where they are.
After thoroughly examining your digital citizenship agreements, consider the following questions.
• Do they provide clear explanations for each guideline they propose?
• When staff present an agreement to students, do they discuss the guidelines, and do students clearly understand them? Or, are students simply asked to read the agreement and sign it?
In considering these questions, it’s important that you identify any weak areas, where an agreement guideline does not provide a suitable rationale for its existence. Consider, for example, the following guidelines for a school grappling with establishing a rationale for social media use.
• Poor guideline: The use of social media at school is banned.
• Better guideline: The use of social media or any online resources should be educationally focused and not be a distraction to learning.
Understand that the goal is to avoid off-task behavior that negatively impacts student learning outcomes while also accepting that students can productively use social media platforms as tools for online collaboration and peer mentoring. The first guideline does not accomplish this goal, but the second guideline does.
When you have a clearly established rationale for each guideline in a digital citizenship agreement, you can begin to focus on its implementation.
Implementation
Although less common in U.S. schools, in many schools around the world, one of the key aspects of daily life is the school diary. This provides a place for the vital practice of recording the important elements of the school day or week, homework, assessments, and sporting and cultural events. In Andrew’s school, at the front of the diary in a place of pride is the digital citizenship agreement. There are three separate, school-specific agreements for each of the district’s three different schools—primary (elementary), middle (intermediate and junior high), and high (senior or secondary) school. Parents can also easily access them on the school website.
Each year, the eleventh-grade students work through a series of lessons focused on the digital citizenship agreements and the broader concept of global digital citizenship. The school asks these students to contribute to the process of updating and refreshing each guideline within the digital citizenship agreements. They propose changes and modifications that the school may or may not accept, and that reflect their changing digital environment. A similar process happens in the seventh grade. The school selected these grades because, in the New Zealand curriculum framework, they were the change point from primary school to middle school and from middle school to senior school. These points represent a significant change in the expectations schools place on students and their responsibilities as learners. The students’ ages also match well to significant periods of cognitive development and their development of ethical foundations.
Providing students with input and valuing their contribution increase student body buy-in. Any modifications to the school’s agreements are made in the spirit and ethos of providing the students with clear and appropriate guidance for global digital citizenship at school and beyond.
However, implementation goes beyond just a few sessions seeking student engagement in the process. It must be more than simply publishing the guidelines in a diary, on posters in the classrooms, or on the school’s website. Effective and transformational implementation includes three groups of key stakeholders actively modeling these concepts—(1) students, (2) staff, and (3) the wider community. In particular, teachers’ expectations of acknowledgement of sources, fair-use rules, and acceptable online behavior must be so natural and so ingrained that they become part of all teaching.
Consider the following questions.
• How often do staff use the agreements (or the guidelines that the agreements represent) in community, school, and classroom activities? Never? Once per year? Once per term? Once per week? Daily? Every lesson?
• Where are the digital citizenship agreements? Are they displayed in the classroom, made part of the school publications, and immediately at hand? Are they stored away and not easily accessible?
In a perfect world, the agreement guidelines are integrated into all activities that occur across the school. Although it is good to have the agreements as a poster in the room, or appended to the school diary or planner, these are merely starting points. The ultimate goal is still to integrate the principles into everyday teaching and learning so that they become second nature.
With fully developed digital citizenship agreements in place, agreements that include clear and rational guidelines, you can turn your attention to their support.
Support
To make sustainable and long-lasting change for how students use technology, there must be an agreeable and shareable vision from which to derive attainable goals. There must also be a clear process to facilitate the change. The