August 2004 — Features
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Monitoring Technology Misuse & Abuse
A Five-Step Plan for Creating a Digital Citizenship Program in Your School.
Over the last two years, it has become evident that a behavior pattern of misuse and abuse with respect to technology is beginning to emerge in our society. This outbreak of technology misuse and abuse is documented in continual news coverage on TV, in newspapers and on the Internet — both inside and outside of schools. The endless list of misuse and abuse includes hacking into school servers, using e-mail to intimidate or threaten students, illegally downloading music, plagiarizing information from the Internet, using cellular phones during class time, accessing pornographic Web sites, and playing video games during class. Therefore, if you are using technology in your district, you must begin to deal with digital citizenship in a significant way.
Five-Step Program
One of the first steps in dealing with digital citizenship is awareness — determining whether digital citizenship is a significant issue within your school district. Digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of behavior with regard to technology use. Therefore, the Digital Citizenship Audit is a quick way for your administrators and teachers to determine if their technology is being properly used, misused or abused. Start creating your own program by following these five steps:
Step 1: Complete the Digital Citizenship Audit (see chart below).
Step 2: Analyze your results using the scoring guides (see Page 25).
Step 3: Have your technology leadership team discuss the following questions after they have completed the audit:
- Is there a significant problem?
- If there is a significant problem, how aware are teachers, students, board members and community members?
Step 4: Engage stakeholders in a discussion of your audit findings and extend the discussion to include the following questions:
