21st Century Learning and Teaching

Technology is not value-free. John Merrow explains how to turn kids — who are digital natives — into good digital citizens.

Schools today must provide opportunities for young people to create knowledge out of the swirling clouds of information that surround them 24/7. You went to school because that’s where the knowledge was stored. That was yesterday.

Think how different today’s world is. Today’s young people need guidance in sifting through the flood of information and turning it into knowledge.

They need to be able to formulate good questions — because computers have all the answers.

Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

Today’s K–12 students are commonly called “digital natives” because they have grown up with digital technology. But natives can run wild, using the Internet to (wittingly or unwittingly) plagiarize others’ work or bully peers using social media.

Now, educators are teaching digital natives how to become good digital citizens. As defined by federal officials in the recently released National Education Technology Plan and by educators in the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS), model digital citizens “practice safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and tools.”

While cyberbullying remains a concern, teachers are helping students investigate the weighty issue of intellectual property rights in order to keep them within legal and ethical bounds. Using websites as well as their own tools, they are helping students understand important concepts such as fair use and copyright, and are also helping them see the relevance in these topics by learning how to protect their own digital work.

Schools have always been charged with the task of producing good citizens. But how has our definition of a "good citizen" changed over the ages?

===> Teaching and learning also about what is legal and what are the consequences of being part of illegal actions <===

It looks like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s been especially busy over the past 48 hours, because they’re suddenly snatching up alleged members of hack collectives LulzSec and Anonymous across the United States.

According to FoxNews.com, the F.B.I. arrested two members allegedly affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous yesterday morning—one in San Francisco, one in Phoenix—while a third suspect was charged in Ohio.