Thinking Big – Digital Citizenship

This morning an interesting thought came to me – it was one of those things that once it was in my head I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it earlier.

For the PYP exhibition you will be looking at the Big Picture. I am guessing many of you already have or are already thinking about an idea of an issue/topic that you might want to focus on – that is great. I too was actually thinking about issues/topics that could work and I thought about “Digital Citizenship“.

You might think – What does Digital Citizenship have to do with the Big Picture and the Compass? – but take a moment and think about it.

Just look at the Organising Theme of the unit – Sharing the Planet. Two of the main points raised in this theme are

• communities and their relationships between them
• peace and conflict

Thinking about these I can see the connection to Digital Citizenship straight away. You all have your own online community (Facebook, MSN, email, etc) and I know many of you have already to come to realise that there is a need to focus on “peace and conflict” in your online communities.

I thought that I would share this idea/connection with you. I know that before this morning I had not made the connection between being safe/responsible online and the PYP exhibition and I thought you might be in the same position that I was.

Just some food for thought – Mr Will

“Soulsearching”

In order for us to work out what issues we want to focus on for the exhibition, we have had to do a lot of soulsearching. We have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about what we truly care about, what our passions are, what evokes strong emotions, what affects us personally and what we could have a tangible effect on.

Today, we started to reach some conclusions. One thing that really helped was this interesting process:

Do You Know Your Purpose?

We also used the “Zones of Effect” in order to think carefully about whether or not things affect us personally or whether or not we are part of the problem. This was interesting because examples like the Earth’s finite resources are global issues, but also each one of us is part of the problem (and also part of the solution).

Once we started getting a clear idea of the issues we were interested in and that they were personally relevant, we made a display that showed our issues and the connections between them.

Let’s carry on with this process on the Blog. Make a comment with your issue and then reply to other people’s issues that are connected to yours.