Dear Teachers, What a whirlwind of learning we've all be thrown into in the past couple of weeks! Few of us were prepared to start executing the emergency remote teaching we've had to learn so quickly, and those of us who have had ANY experience with distance learning courses know how much goes into the … Continue reading Digital Citizenship in Remote Learning

Dear Teachers, What strange times these are! Only a couple of weeks ago, I was out at a mall doing some shopping, and a whole bunch of other people were doing the same. My husband and I were starting to make plans for an anniversary vacation in May. I was furiously planning several different professional … Continue reading All Times Are Unprecedented

Dear Teachers, When I'm not delivering professional development or talking/thinking/dreaming about digital citizenship, I'm either reading, walking my dog, or doing yoga. Yesterday at yoga, I got an inspiration for this blog post: let's make social media more like yoga! If you're scratching your head a bit at that thought, allow me to explain. My … Continue reading Why Social Media Should Be More Like Yoga

Dear Teachers, For years now, I have wanted to build an app for Digital Citizenship, one that would give teachers a variety of simple activities and talking points for doing that "seamless integration into what you're doing anyway" that we in the #DigCit world always talk about. I was thinking that I would develop it … Continue reading Wanna Help Me Build Something Cool?

Dear Teachers, One of my favorite yoga teachers has a gift for words and language, and as a CWN (Certified Word Nerd), I love what she has to say and how she says it. One of her oft-said phrases is "Reach for nothing; push nothing away." She says this while we are bent into some … Continue reading Push Nothing Away

Dear Teachers, Every week I look forward to my favorite 75-minute Deep Stretch yoga class. It's a delicious and therefore very popular class, so I always try to arrive early so I can find a spot and get settled in. Today the spot I selected was about a mat's length away from the front corner … Continue reading Lessons from the Yoga Mat

Dear Teachers, I gotta admit that sometimes I feel like a lone voice shouting into the void with this digital citizenship thing I always go on about. I feel like I've been that little whack-a-mole person popping up annoyingly to say, "Yoo-hoo, over here - digital citizenship is important, remember? Don't forget to talk to … Continue reading A #DigCit Groundswell… I Hope!

Dear Teachers, Do you remember being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Although I vaguely remember that question when I was a kid, I'm honestly not sure whether people in my family ever asked me that. It was a given that I would go to college; that was What We … Continue reading What Do You Want to Be?

Dear Teachers, It's back to school time, and I was THRILLED to have an opportunity this past Monday to address our secondary teachers on my favorite topic. Back in December, I had been asked to put the event on my calendar, and I had assumed it would be the usual "three rotations, expect 25ish people … Continue reading On Digital Citizenship and Free Speech

Dear Teachers, When teachers hear the term “digital citizenship”  and want to know more about that topic, they often begin with some kind of interest in addressing cyberbullying. Cyberbullying and other risks of the Internet - computer viruses, identity theft, phishing, etc. - are legitimate concerns, of course, and our students certainly need to be … Continue reading Growing Digital Citizens as We Grow Ourselves