Apiti School – Process for developing a digital citizenship agreement

Here at Apiti, we’ve looked at digital citizenship, especially this year when we had a child’s blog hacked into. The children when they come here, through the parent handbook, they sign a permission slip that their pictures can be online but these need revamping so we’ve been working through with the digital citizenship at my school, where we fit in. We’ve also tried to involve the children as we do here. So the staff have been working through the digital citizenship one and then we introduced it to the Board and the Board worked through, what does it look like at my school? And how we’re doing things. At the beginning, the Board was very keen on just protecting the kids and blocking things and it took us a long time to give them information on how we can educate the kids rather than the blocking part so how the children can become, take ownership of it.

So we’ve had agreement forms in the past, student use agreement forms but we find that they’re very limited. So we used Connected Learning Advisory to come and speak to the parents night and the local principals got together with them and we discussed it with all the local principals. We’re trying to write a digital user agreement. We thought we’d put it to our star, strive to be the best, think of others, active learner, and responsible and then use the digital citizen bullet points from NetSafe. We got the children to list what they thought it would look like. As a confident capable user of ICT, the children thought use the computer as a tool for learning and last night the Board looked through these and they added some things as well.