Teaching: ITED 8100 at VSU

Yes, I'm still teaching my online class at VSU! In some ways I very connected to this group, as if "VSU" was not between us. The only thing that's a bit difficult is the time difference, and that is only a consideration when we are doing synchronous activities as we did this week in Wimba Live Classroom.

We had a two week time period when the USA (pronounced OOSHA here) had gone to Daylight Savings Time and Hungary had not yet gone to Central European Daylight Savings Time--only five hours difference then! But, timing is everything, and by the time the students were to do their Wimba Live Classroom presentations on issues in Digital Citizenship, we were back to six hours ahead. My students were very considerate, however, and scheduled their sessions as early as they possibly could after getting home from school. That made for only a few nights of my staying up 'til the wee hours! The presentations were all very good, so it was definitely worth it.

I'm preparing for my presentation on the cross-cultural aspects of Digital Citizenship for NETWORKSHOP 2009, the 18 Országos Konferencia to be held in Szeged, Hungary, 2009. aprilis 15-17. So the 30 minute professional development sessions on various aspects of Digital Citizenship presented by the five groups in ITED 8100 were very helpful to me--and, so the Workshop Evaluation data indicates, to the student presenters and their participant peers.

All of the presentations were very good. I'll mention one of them that addressed the Rights and Responsibilities theme of Digital Citizenship, particularly for the teenage level student.

Group Cuatro chose three areas to explore, and to make suggestions as to how secondary teachers could teach, model, and enforce appropriate student behaviors in these important and rapidly changing areas.

The first topic was cheating and plagiarizing, a big concern for teachers and parents. They explored the whys and hows of cheating, elicited participant response and ideas, and made suggestions for controlling the problems.

Another important concern was the problem of cyberbullying, something that those of us in higher education do not often think about except when high profile cases hit the news. But, for high school teachers in the USA, this is a daily problem. I am interested to find out if this is a problem in Hungary.

Finally, the group shocked some of the participants with descriptions of the very sophisticated technology-aided cheating that is now becoming common. Many in the audience pledged to be more keenly aware of the technology in use by their students, and to read more on the topic in up-to-date sources on the Web.