My first foray into the concept of “digital footprint” happened in 2010 just after I got my school issued iPad. The school where I was working at the time had a cart of iPads. I was going through them one day deleting the masses of pictures on the camera rolls (I know, don’t even say it), when I came across a picture of my husband and myself sitting in our bedroom (clothes on). I had been showing him how to use an iPad to take a picture (remember this was 2010 the selfie wasn’t a phenom yet), and yet here we were on an iPad in the storage room of a school. Welcome to the Cloud! Our school district was just beginning what would be the largest deployment of iPads in NA, and there would be many kinks (like this one) to work out. I have always been very aware of the level of decorum expected from elementary school teachers by the Canadian public, so this “seeing myself” was a shocker.
Part of what we do in the two elementary schools I work, is guide students through the Digital Citizenship curriculum set out by MediaSmarts. However, digital citizenship isn’t so much checking off a box, as grooming a mindset of awareness.
Copyright is an issue that comes up all the time at school. Printing a picture off the internet, showing a movie (whether educational or not), photocopying the cover of a book for display were all occasions where strict copyright rules would forbid. I think part of the “fair dealing” push came from the arena of education, where the use of a picture wasn’t because someone was trying to claim the picture as their own, but that it perfectly showed what that person was trying to show their students.
Copyright also comes up during discussion at school for projects, where students are asked to cite sources, acknowledge photos, and reference background music (those conversations have to start somewhere).
Copyright also came up during a conversation with a Zumba instructor I met who was raised in Chile. She said copyright is never even thought about there, and it was quite an eye-opener for her upon coming to Canada to have to consider that in her selection of music, as well as knowing that part of her yearly membership fees (who knew there was a Zumba teacher association) was going to pay for use of music.