Duration: 2:30
Staff and students from Apiti School explain some of the practical strategies they have put in place to ensure they are safe and responsible digital citizens.
Ben Pratt: As a Board of Trustees, we’re concerned about what digital citizenship means and how it’s going to work within our school.
Mary Cuming: The children do sign when they come into the school a digital citizenship agreement. We’re trying to get the children to write it because they’re the people therefore that will be able to use it and if they write it, they will take ownership of it.
Nicki Fielder: Our journey was accelerated this year really when one of our students had a horrid comment put on a blog and we suddenly realised that even though we’re a small rural remote school, we’re part of a global community and we need to set our students up so that they’re empowered in that community. And so from there, we set on a journey to seek advice as to how we could best a) educate and b) setup systems so that our parents and our students are safe and confident users of ICT. So we worked with the Connected Learning Advisory and NetSafe and developed parent programmes and programmes for actually the cluster education leaders around this area so that we could make sure that we were setting up systems for our students.
Hannah: The music videos that I made, some of the little girls wanted to dance to it and it made us think about the copyright so we found out that you actually just needed to put the creative commons logo on it and that was really all you had to do.
Brooke: We’ve been doing a lot on Internet safety at the moment. Usually age, address is a no no. At our school we’re just trusted and if we break it we aren’t trusted and then we have to be watched.
Nicki Fielder: We need to make sure that rather than blocking the use of anything around ICT that we actually empower and educate our students so that they feel confident to make the right choices and to be responsible users of digital technology.
Mary Cuming: And a good digital citizen is a good citizen.
Brooke: Don’t talk to strangers, ‘cos they could be a master criminal or something.