When planning for and creating a Web Guide for educators it was very relevant to me in my role as the Digital Technologies Leader at the primary school that I work at, the potential that this tool could empower teachers in my school setting to feel better equipped to incorporate the use of social media in their classrooms was exciting.

This has been an area of resistance from staff at my school due to the fact that online environments where social interaction with a known or unknown audience can often mean that the educator feels like they cannot keep young learners safe however, as discussed by Wheeler, a 21st Century learner is a communicator, collaborator creator and an observant digital citizen. Therefore, educators must embark in the formalised teaching of online social media safety and citizenship for our young learners.

Some challenges that I encountered when creating the web guide and the artefact was the ability to make this guide come to life in a succinct and targeted manner specific to the message that I wanted to get across to educators.

These were the relevance of the use of social media in the classroom;

• on a personal, social, cultural and global level
• the digital learning environment required to make this happen
• a reflection on where the individual educator is placed for implementing this in their own educational settings.

I worked to incorporate the multilayered approach of tying in Digital Learning Environments, Digital Citizenship, Social Networking and Planning as I strongly believe that they all come hand in hand to suitably cater for the 21st century learner.
Other challenges were with the Thinkspace site where I found many of the WordPress tools were unavailable for use and more limited than other websites such as WIX. Selecting the most appropriate web 2.0 tools was also challenging as I wanted the guide and artefact to be engaging but valuable for demonstrating how they can be used in classrooms.

In the future, my digital citizenship work will be to implement this web guide at my school which will hopefully work to alleviate some hesitation by educators who are not digital natives and unaware of appropriate platforms and safety measures used for young digital citizens. Hopefully this will increase confidence to deliver these topics and empower the educator.

I will seek feedback from educators after they have engaged with this tool and my next steps will be to review and improve the guide based on colleague feedback. Following this, I would aim to create a student web guide and artefact that will encourage them to learn and reflect on the importance of demonstrating good Digital Citizenship whilst engaging in social networking platforms.

References

Wheeler, V (2016 June 11). Exploring Digital Citizenship http://vmw25.net/ed-654/exploring-digital-citizenship/