Social Networking and Digital Citizenship

I worked with Dave today and was totally inspired by his enthusiasm and his commitment to the setting up of an e-Learning environment in his classroom. At the moment he is concentrating on his online spaces and the classroom spaces will follow.
He has set up a classroom wiki http://theclasswithoutwalls.wikispaces.com/ which is aptly called 'The Classroom without Walls'. This also has a link to his blog http://theclasswithoutwalls.blogspot.com/
Each child has a wikipage to publish work to, plus Dave has set up Kidblogs for each students. The class blog is used for general topical events, the Wiki for timetables, homework, general tasks, learning tools, tutorials, surveys and forms, planning and assessment. It is worthwhile checking out his own reflective blog http://digitoolsforschools.blogspot.com/ which follows his own journey in teaching and e-Learning.
His classroom page on the e-Learning wiki is http://elearningclassroom.wikispaces.com/Classroom+7

Dave has been thinking about how he could get his students developing social networking skills so he has started his students on Twiducate. This is 'Twitter' for kids. To start off with he has set them up with accounts and passwords, and they have all had a go at posting comments. This is a great lead in to the 'Digital Citizenship' topic that will be part of his whole classroom programme.
We talked about how this is a great opportunity to talk to his class about "how we should post online'.

Kid's comments and posts

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

This slideshow is a great starting point at the beginning of the year to show students how they should be writing online.
Dave and I talked about how should the students write... should they be allowed to use text language? As his motto is 'The Class Without Walls' we talked about how posting online on a classroom account means it has the same rules as writing in the classroom, that there should be high expectations of the quality of writing. This fits in well with the Digital Citizenship work that the whole e-Learning cluster will be doing with their students.