I have just made a ‘bit’. Not a big ‘bit’, just a little ‘bit’. And I’m hoping that it’s a bit useful to teachers who are helping students learn about digital citizenship. And you can make a ‘bit’, too.
‘Bits’ are the individual resources on Netsafe’s new site, Learn | Guide | Protect. The site is organised around three strands:
- “the skills students learn to keep themselves safe,
- the guidance they need from educators to learn how to manage challenges,
- the protective mechanisms schools can use to improve their immediate safety”.
The key to the site’s development lies in the fact that items are crowd-sourced. Anyone can make a resource—or ‘bit’—and assign it to one of the three strands. The items can be mixed, mashed and combined to suit learning contexts and schools’ needs.
Teachers and school leaders can locate bits that relate to the strand that they are interested in—but also by learning area, year level, aspects of digital citizenship, and key competency.
Bits are ranked by popularity, and contributors feature, too, both of which offer nice incentives for people to offer up resources as they find or develop them. At the time of writing, the most viewed items included Using Facebook safely and Anti Virus Software for Schools. You can even say ‘hello’ to the newest bit, which is mine, Smartcopying: A guide to copyright.
The flexible, collaborative approach to building a useful, up-to-the-minute repository successfully takes elements of social networking and applies them to the context of digital citizenship within the New Zealand curriculum.
So what are you waiting for? Go say ‘hello’ to a bit – or even better, add your own.
Karen Spencer
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