For my final project for course 2, I worked with Jaime Richard, Daryil Imanishi and Naho Kikuchi. At our school all of the Acceptable Use Agreements are different for each level of school. When these agreements were written they were done so with a focus on only individual divisions. They were not written to be a school wide document. They also take into consideration things like the care of computers and not just on the use of the computer. The current statements are lengthy and not very child friendly. I currently have one child in grade 5 and another in grade 6. At the beginning of the year, we had to go over their separate agreements with them and explain and interpret the documents for them. This took some time as we wanted to make sure they understood them Then, each of them and myself had to sign the documents stating that we had read and understood their contents before returning them to their teacher.
We began this project with the idea of writing a new Acceptable Use Agreements for our elementary and middle schools. Our hope was to come up with something that we could present to our schools either as a finished document that they could use or as a starting point for creating new AUA’s. We spent the first couple of meeting times trying to come up with an idea for an agreement that would be simpler and easier for children to understand and remember. We tried to come up with something catchy that he kids would remember. We wanted it to be focused on Respect, Responsibility, Safety and Honesty. After much discussion and a couple of false starts, we decided to create a poster that could be used K to 12.
Our poster is very simple. We have a very graphic image of some computers and then an overriding statement followed by 4 simple statements under the headings of Respect, Responsibility, Safety and Honesty. We wanted to keep everything focused on the positive and used I will to start our 4 basic statements. Our hope is that this poster could be used K-12 without a lot of help to understand it in the lower grades. I also feel that some simple lessons could be developed from this poster in an effort to move forward in teaching responsible use and digital citizenship. Hopefully this poster could also lead to further discussions K-12 in developing a comprehensive set of guidelines to help keep our students safe and aware in the 21st century.
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