Developing Ethical Direction

Ethical Direction Summary and Response

The article Developing Ethical Direction brings to light a very important question: Is it the teacher’s responsibility to teach students digital citizenship? In exploring this article, the authors discuss the idea that everyone has an internal compass which instinctively helps a person determine right from wrong. However, many children nowadays don’t know how to find and use their “internal compass” when using digital technology. The authors argues that “learning digital citizenship is rooted in discussion and dialogue and not in acceptable use policies (AUPs) that are simply lists of dos and don’ts.” If teachers are going to teach their students learn about digital citizenship, they can use the digital citizenship compass to stimulate student dialogue and reflection. The authors state that teaching digital citizenship needs to become a priority for educators. Technology misuse and abuse among students has become a societal problem that continues to grow. It is now a problem that needs to be addressed particularly among young students as they are tomorrow’s future.

My response to this article is that yes, I believe educators play an important role in helping students understand the appropriate use of technology but I’m not all quite sure if it is a responsibility that every educator should carry. I don’t think educators should be the remedy in fixing all of society’s problems. There must be other ways that people are held accountable for their actions. Ideally, parents should be the ones responsible for teaching their children how to use technology appropriately as they are the ones paying for it. However, in current times children spend far more time out of their homes than they do with their families. As educators we can set a good example for our students when we use technology as it is a large part of our instruction. If we are expecting our students to use technology in our classrooms we need to do our part in helping raise a generation of students that understands and practices the appropriate use of technology.

Bailey, G. & Ribble, M. "Developing ethical direction.” Learning & Leading with Technology 32.7 (2005): 36-38.

Web Publishing Project

My primary focus for this project was to create a user-friendly classroom website to maintain ongoing communication with parents. The parent population that I work with prefers communicating by email and therefore I thought a website would be a great way for them to stay informed about what’s happening in the classroom. The Bellevue School District uses SharePoint as the web application for teacher websites, so I logged in and began exploring. I quickly realized that SharePoint has some great features but also some limitations. It was easy to use to upload documents, post announcements, and create a calendar of events. However, it took me a while to figure out how to add another list of links. When it came to organizing the web parts on the main page, it was not simple and straight forward. I had to play around with it for a while before I created a design I was happy with. One nice feature about using SharePoint to create my webpage is that parents don’t have to see any ads and they are required to log in.

Only parents and student in the Bellevue School District can view my webpage.
Using SharePoint to create a website was simple and easy to use. In the future I see myself creating a website through a different source that offers more flexibility in terms of what I can add and modify. SharePoint was somewhat limiting in that I’ve only been able to add pictures and videos as attachments under folders. Ideally, I would like to be able to add picture slides and short videos to the main page.

The link to my webpage is below. However, you will probably not be able to see it since you would be required to log in. I included a small picture down below for you to see.
https://myportal.bsd405.org/personal/villanueva,%20delia/mysite/default.aspx