Digital Citizenship

When utilizing technology in the classroom creating a positive technological learning environment is a very important aspect to successful implementation. This requires students to be responsible digital citizens. As an eLearning teacher I have struggled significantly with the concept of preserving academic integrity in a online environment. Particularly in a subject area such as math, most solutions will look essentially identical if they are correct so it can be very difficult to validate that the student has not copied the solutions from another source. It is problematic that students may be able to copy solutions from the internet or other students, I have adopted a new philosophy on test writing academic integrity. Our idea of a student's ability to demonstrate their understanding needs to adapt with the integration of technology in the classroom and our world. The internet provided us access to endless amounts of information. As a result, it no longer seems as necessary to ensure students are able to complete assessments without access to additional information. If a student is able access the information and use their research and critical analysis skills to assess information that relates to their problem. Additionally, collaboration with peers is also something that educators may want to rethink during evaluations. Traditionally collaboration would be viewed as "cheating", but if students are able to develop solutions to problems with peers they are still demonstrating understanding of the topics. Therefore, as educators I think that it is important to reevaluate how we assess students so that it relates to jobs in the digital age and the skills that they will require for these jobs.