Julie, thank you for being on the K-12 tech podcast. I’m excited to have you on to talk about digital citizenship
I am grateful to get to be with you today and this is one of my soapbox topics. So it should be a fun time
Great. So why don’t you walk us in, like, for everyone new Hallie Kilavos is new to K-12 Tech as our head relationship manager, and she’s going to be kind of my co-host on this podcast going forward.
Yeah.
So Julie, can you start from the beginning kind of your journey and education and then kind of what you’re doing to what you’re doing now and then we will hop into digital citizenship.
Yeah, so I actually was an accountant before I became an educator. I was working 70, to 80 hours a week, wanted to have a family, and stayed home. And then when I decided I wanted to go back to work, I thought, you know what I’d really like to do? And what kind of always seemed to happen when I was in accounting was teach. Like I’d be the one. They’d say, Go teach them how to do this. And I was like, Wait a minute. So my thought was, I’ll teach accounting. So I went back to school, and became certified as a business education teacher. I have yet to ever teach accounting because the doors that open up or computers. And so my first job was teaching computer applications at Microsoft Word, all that type of stuff in a high school setting. Then I ended up being a part-time computer teacher at the school that my children went to during all that time. This was pre-mobile learning. This was mostly me teaching kids how to type. And then, one day iPads came onto the scene. But the year before, iPads came onto the scene, I decided I would get my master’s in instructional technology. So when the iPads rolled out, I was the person that our school district said, okay, tell us how to use these.
Notice the timing there. I was like, I’ve never touched an iPad. How is that going to work? But regardless, I became that person. My role changed into more of a tech coach eventually, and then I ended up as the director of Instructional Technology and Innovation in that same school system for 16 years. Recently, over the last three years. I am an adjunct instructor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where I teach both undergraduate and graduate-level courses on educational technology
That’s awesome. And so well-said. So accountant. Did any of that translate when you got into the technology world? Do you think, like learning that technical side helped to kind of get into the weeds a little bit? Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some of the some of that translated?
Yeah. First of all, I would say I’m a boss at budgeting because that was my background. So I could budget like nobody’s business. Most educators don’t even know where to begin. And so that was a really easy transition for me. Then I would also say that just forming connections with outside businesses… that was much easier for me because I had that business background with marketing and all that type of stuff as well. But as far as the technology side, I think what it allowed me to do is I have that side of me that’s a very analytical thinker. So learning how to troubleshoot and how to set up products and things like that. It came a lot easier to me than, say, most people when they first started doing that type of thing.
Yeah, And I think also in accounting, there’s so much of having to teach yourself like very small technical things like processes and even seeing different softwares and stuff. There’s like a lot of that learning that’s involved in that. And that’s like one trait I’ve noticed between a lot of technology people, especially in EdTech, is they’re really good at teaching themselves how to do things. I think that’s like you have to have that trait to excel in this environment.
I think you do. If not, you’re banging your head against the wall, constantly, are calling a help desk, and waiting forever for, you know, someone to actually help you. So I think it’s the nature of the beast we’ve learned how to teach ourselves.
So you really were in education, technology at a transfer, like a very transformative period with the AI, like I remember that’s when I got started about 12 years ago in this business when like the iPad one, iPad two started getting introduced into schools. So like from the start and then kind of working that into the digital citizenship, what issues did you see early on in edtech that was like that really led that I’m like, this is going to be a big need.
Yeah, I think definitely in the beginning when we got our first rolling cart of iPads, Apple Configurator was impossible, and you’d think you set something up and it was never set up correctly. And then I’d go to take them to the class and students had access to things, but I never intended them to have access to. And so it was this worth it type thing in the very beginning, you know? And then as time went on, I think what we began to see was that there were more safeguards put into place, that type of thing. But immediately, I felt like I was putting out fires constantly and I was constantly reacting to something that happened in the classroom. And I didn’t like that space at all because I feel like this is my big soapbox moment. If you’re going to put technology in the hands of students, you need to prepare them for it beforehand. You don’t react when they do something wrong.
You set expected stations so that they know how to react if they’re put in certain situations. And let’s be honest, eventually every child everywhere is going to have a moment when they go, Wait a minute, am I supposed to be looking at this right now? Are you making that choice to do a certain search or whatever it is? So it was at that moment and at that time I was an elementary computer teacher. So at that time it was very important for me to help my students start thinking about and I call them light bulb moments. If you ever saw Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote and all of a sudden, they’d have an idea, and the light bulb would come over their head. That was what I would say to my students. I was like, I want you to have a light bulb moment. When you’re put in that situation, and you see something, and you’re going, This makes me feel uncomfortable. Ah, what would I do if my grandmother was standing behind me right now? You’ve got to make that decision one way or the other.
So what that meant for me was digital citizenship. And so I started looking at common sense media. I became a commonsense media educator. Also, our school was a common sense media school for one year. But my desire was to help students really start looking at all the aspects of digital citizenship, privacy, and the media balance. That’s a huge one, just teaching them very young. Hey, sometimes you need just to go outside, not be on your computer all the time. What a digital footprint looks like and what that means. And just all that type of thing. Cyberbullying and how you should conduct yourself. And to be honest, all that happens with parents at the same time it happens with children. So we weren’t getting very good modeling from the parents either. Like, it wasn’t one of those things where I could go look at the way your mother does it because your mother was the one on MySpace acting like a fool at the time, you know. So I think the issue was how do we do this in a way where we start making this generation see the importance of all these things moving forward.
So like, when you’re are you the one building that policy with the superintendent principals, or is it just part of your computer class in the beginning? Can you, like, walk through maybe maybe even baby steps? Because maybe some schools have not fully launched this out? Like what were the small steps you took in the beginning and then maybe how did you compound?
Right. Well, as a computer teacher in the elementary school, the way I started it was I was teaching units on these different topics when they come to see me. So I would have a unit media balance, I would have a unit on privacy, I would have a unit. So media literacy and depending on the age like preschool years, I started with just how to be safe online. And so that’s how I started. Then my role kind of moved into the tech coach. Well, I would come into the classroom, and I would teach pre-K to second grade. These are digital literacy. Our digital citizenship things I want them to know. And then fourth or fifth. And then we went on up because we were a K-12 school, a pre-K-12 school. We went all the way up. Honestly, we didn’t do so much in high school because that was an elective. The computer class was an elective. So our goal was to try to figure out how do you embed that into a lesson that you’re already teaching, How do you speak into that space? So as a tech coach, when I would go into a classroom and, let’s say we’re doing research, there’s always is an opportunity where you look over, and some kid’s supposed to be looking at the Battle of the Bulge, and instead he’s looking at gastric bypass surgery. And so it gives me an opportunity to talk about, you know, what it means to multitask and what it means to make wise choices when you’re using your technology.
So I think a lot of it became just my role. I just kind of adopted that. But from pre-K to grades eight, we actually embedded it into computer science as well. Are the computer classes that we taught. What I teach now to my pre-service teachers and my teachers who are already in is how to embed it into a lesson plan they already have. So teachers don’t have enough time. And when I start saying you’re going to embed a digital citizenship into a lesson, they’re like, I don’t there’s not enough room in my day. I can’t do that. But once I start showing them that you really are teaching it already, you’re already teaching them about media literacy because when you’re teaching them about research is showing them how to look for good resources. And so when they realize that, hey, I am kind of doing this, and I can be more responsible and more proactive about it, and that way when I walk by a student, and I see them off task, and I close their computer, there’s no push back. We’ve already talked about this. We’ve already said why it was important. And that’s and that’s the beauty of, I think, embedding it into a lesson you already have. Yeah, I think that’s smart. On the proactive side, most schools have a fair use policy.
We help schools kind of write that for like their devices, but that’s just like a legal document, like, I guarantee, you know, like I guarantee probably 90% of parents are like, All right, sign it. This is another thing I’m signing. But like most of the time, it’s the parent signing it, and a child doesn’t even look at it. But who are you holding responsible? The child. And so, you know, it’s really this disconnect between that. And so, you know, a lot of teachers, I also teach them to have what my pre-service teachers create an acceptable use policy for your class like, here’s and I want you to sign it, and I want you to take it home and have your parents sign it. So that way you knew what to expect.
Yeah. So digital citizenship is so much bigger than I originally thought. It was like digital literacy. I knew about that. But like even digital etiquette or digital law, digital rights, like even health and wellness, like, hey, like, take a break. How Like getting involved in social media. I think, you know, there’s a lot of studies out there talking about the negative effects of just being all consumed with that cyberbullying on on the social media.
As you know, I live in a neighborhood and I’m just hearing the drama on like Snapchat in and just how cruel some of these kids can be to each other and how what tools do you as a student and then you as a parent to help you kind of combat that, because that is going to affect how time in the classroom is spent. And one question I had is, is there actually good curriculum that schools can have that’s templated out there right now for this?
So there’s actually, as I mentioned before, Common Sense Media has some lesson plans that they already do with videos and things like that. For me, I never just accept it as this is the lesson I’m going to teach. I kind of tweaked it for me. I think a lot of teachers would do that, tweak it for my own usage, for my own students that I was teaching. And it’s free. It’s a good starting point, I think to begin with. There are other ones as well, but I think that one’s very easy to navigate, and I think that in my opinion, if I were going to tell a teacher, okay, you’ve got to teach this, and this is what I do for one of my assignments. Actually, I have them go in, choose one of the lesson plans there, and then they have to adapt that lesson plan for the lesson plan that they’re teaching that day. So they have to tell me how they’re integrating it.
So it gives you a way to kind of think through how because not everyone, I mean, you just listed some of the different elements. Not every element lends itself to a math class, but there are some that do. And so figuring out, you know, and in a school district, okay, who should be teaching what and when and where, I think is an important part of it.
Yeah. And I think even, you know, starting the cybersecurity conversations with students at a young age because talking with insurance companies, there’s companies now where, like, you can’t even get cybersecurity insurance anymore. Because just because of just internal employees and stuff and like training that heavily in the schools too of like hey when you get to the workplace like you are a target for this information and it’s going to be like a whole like combating kind of thing.I could see that being like a big focus and would be really valuable to start at such a young age. It’s so that it’s changed so quickly.
Sure. I you know, and I think we’ll see continuing changes in those digital citizenship. Age is going to impact that tremendously. I mean, I’m speaking specifically into what is ethical use of what I look like when I’m talking to students now. So I think we’re going to see that always migrating forward and adapting to the world that we live in at the time.
Yeah, I’m kind of curious.. Go ahead, Hallie
I was thinking about how you’re saying about how you’re at a point where you’re almost reacting and trying to get ahead of it. And I was thinking, are you kind of in that phase again right now, then, with how rapidly AI is coming out now?
So I think that issue, the difference is with all the other things that I dealt with, it was very flagrant when and easy to spy that something’s not right or something’s been done wrong. The use of AI is so subversive we might not even realize it’s being used. And so instead of trying to shut down this app or shut down or, you know, make it where they can’t access it for my own personal use. And I know this is different because it’s at the college level. I’m actually saying So I don’t want you to use AI for this assignment or in another assignment. I might say it’s okay to use it, but I want you to cite it using APA format. I, I speak into the space so they won’t think. I don’t know.
It doesn’t exist, you know. Now for the K-12, you’ve got privacy concerns because under the age of 18, for many of these, it’s not supposed to be used at all. So there are some out there. There’s Magic school. I think that now, but it’s more of a teacher’s use of that. But you still have to be careful and not put in PII, you know, personally identifiable information. So I think yes, to answer your question, it is harder, but it’s almost impossible. Hard at this point, like I am at a point where I am not going to give a student a zero on something because I think maybe they used they I. I just don’t feel comfortable with that.
And so I’ve got to figure out a, how do I change my assignments so that it doesn’t matter r b, how do I teach them how to use AI responsibly, which is where I want to where I find myself leaning towards how do I teach them how to use it responsibly and use it in a way that they’re still using. They create their creativity and their knowledge forward. So having them look at something, using an AI, and then then figure out and develop is this does this even make sense? What have they missed in all of the studying that I’ve done, and how would I adjust what this says? And so it’s time-consuming. I think it would be hard for a teacher to grab onto that and go, I think teachers are having to change the way papers are written in class more than at home, or they just have to decide, okay, this is the world I live in. How does this look going forward?
Yeah, it’s an interesting concept because, essentially inside of the classroom we have to take a step backwards. So you obviously have devices in there typing, but you would essentially almost have to be like, all right, here’s the old what was it, the blue books or whatever we used to have like write it down, and then it basically like you have to hand write out a certain portion of your assignments, which that makes a lot of sense to me. And then I’m curious if, if there’s been technology now going back to that to be able to like, all right, now I want to be able to put this pamphlet and have it digitized the handwritten digitized, so I can then grade it. You know, it’s like funny or like going backwards. Then you have to go forwards again. Yeah.
And I think the issue is, like, I struggle with the whole idea of going all the way back to paper and pencil because I think it slows the creativity of the student. They don’t, they don’t think about it, they think faster than they write. I mean that was proven a gazillion years ago when I was teaching typing, you know. So, you know, my thing is, and this is what I’m telling my teachers, so have them write their thesis statement on paper and pencil. And then you go over that thesis statement with them and then have them write blocks of paragraphs at a time, type it in your classroom with you.
They’re just blocks of it. And you the beauty of technology is you can be circulating all the time or you can be on a Google doc giving feedback. You know, you have the ability to do some of the things I think technology streamlines for a teacher that it didn’t used to. So giving that feedback, you kind of are going to know their voice if you’re constantly in that feedback loop. And so I think you just have to embrace. I personally feel like you have to embrace more of the technology instead of less of it in order to be aware and online with them as they’re working through these things.
Yeah, I think the importance is how do you continue to pressure critical thinking while still using these tools, and they’re not going away. It’s not like, we’re going to take it out. It’s incredible. We’re going to put it away. It’s like that’s not going to happen. It’s incorporated into everything.
The AI we have now will be the worst AI that these students will ever have. It’s just like our cell phones. You know, this will be the worst cell phone I own this point forward. Hopefully. But you know what I’m saying? Like it’s only going to progress and get better. It’s only going to be embedded into more ed-tech things for me. I’m an educational futurist. I’m excited about that. I like the idea of being able to adapt to a student’s personalized needs because I’m aware of them more than ever before. And so that’ll be a really nice thing, I think.
Yeah, you’re right. And even when we started this and talking about digital citizenship, I, funny enough, didn’t even think about how I just fully like changed that. I think especially on the ethical side. And then honestly, on the digital health and wellness side too, because when GPT came out, I started using that very, very early, and there was a sense of like, this is doing like I felt dumb. I’m like, I like this is so much more intelligent than I am and distance ability to reason. And there is like I use it for a lot of different things than I did when I first started using it. And I think just from a health and wellness side of using it more to amplify more than doing just fully, just doing a lot of work for me. So I’m curious, how has that been thought through? I don’t really know.
On the EdTech side, the health and wellness side with AI, is that been like a topic that’s come up and how that’s going to affect people’s A potentially students ability? Would it potentially dwarf their ability to critically think about things?
Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing the biggest pushback that educators have right now is you know, if we become so reliant, I mean in some ways it’s a lot like the when when we chose to adapt calculators into math classes gazillions of years ago and, you know, everybody was like, they’ve got to learn to do that or that. And still we’re still learning the basics like we always did. But at a certain point…
Even the jokes now about how we have a calculator always on our phone, and they’re like, You’re not going to have a calculator in real life right now.
We have all these things on our phone that we never thought we would ever have access to, right? So I think the difference is, though, and I think this is the thing in my opinion, that we as educators have to really start teaching. And this is more like the media literacy side of digital citizenship is if I put numbers into a calculator correctly, it’s always going to give me the right bad answer, the correct answer. That issue with AI right now is if I put a prompt in, who knows if it’s going to hallucinate, who knows if it’s going to tie it back to a research that doesn’t even exist? Who knows if it’s real or not?
So I think our job as educators is, yes, telling students, hey, it’s out there, and it can make your life easier, but you have to be the discernment. And that’s the critical thinking that has to take part. That’s not it’s not just an acceptance that, okay, here’s my answer. And I think that’s where teachers are actually catching students using it because they’re not even reading it. They’re just turning in something that they ask an AI to write, you know? So I think that’s the thing that we really have to start focusing on the ethics of AI and how that’s going to impact us as individuals, both for creativity and critical thinking.
Who, what is there like an organization out there that you would suggest is like a good place to go and read like the best research done on this specifically for EdTech?
You know what, I don’t know right now where that would be. I know that ISTE has done some stuff on the topic that might be the place I would start in terms of it’s just so new as far as peer-reviewed type documents. I don’t know if there’s any true research that’s been done at this point that I could point to.
Yeah, Yeah, that’s a good point. So you mentioned this in our intro call. Can you talk a little bit about your coffee shop meetings? And what, why you started it and then you know, the purpose of it.
So, we once a month, usually we meet, and when I say we, I started it, it’s probably been ten years ago or more where it was hey educators anywhere in Chattanooga area if you’re interested, come meet with us on Saturday mornings, one day, one month, one day a month from like for an hour. And if you’re familiar with the Ed Camp movement, it’s kind of like an unconference. So it’s just a meetup. There’s no plan, there’s no top. Here’s what we’re going to talk about. It’s very organic in the way it works. And the reason I started it in the beginning was I was if you’re in Ed Tech, especially if you were in Ed Tech from the beginning, sometimes it feels like you’re putting your head against the wall. And it was just pushback after pushback after pushback. And I was exhausted and I was tired of feeling like I was having to champion everything I did. I had to.
Unlike other roles in schools, they didn’t have to justify what they were doing. I felt like I constantly had to justify any idea I had. So I opened it up. And honestly, my first two or three people who started who were like, Yeah, I want to be a part. They were in the same role I was then, so it gave us a place to lick our wounds and like kind of guard each other up and say, You’ve got this hour. But the big thing was we would sit down, and we were like, So here’s what I’m dealing with. And they’re like, I’m dealing with that too.
Well, what are you doing? Well, this is what I’m doing. And because we were in different districts and had different roles, it did two things. It gave me ideas that I didn’t already have without chat. And it also helped me to kind of realize I wasn’t alone. Like there are other people going through the same type of things. So the beauty of it is we actually own a donut shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And so it actually that’s the place where we meet. So I mean, I don’t know how much they’re coming just to talk about education or the fact that they get a really good donut during that hour that they’re sitting there.
It sounds like a field trip. I don’t know. I’ll have to check it out.
You’re giving up a Saturday morning, so you have to really want to be there. If you, you know
They are probably really good donuts. It sounds like it’s worth it.
Yeah. A quick, quick 12 Chattanooga quick 12-hour drive to get to down. Sounds like a good, good reason. So Julie, I love this I love the idea of digital citizenship. It’s going to become more and more important as like technology, and more research comes out for like tech directors and structural technology people. Do you have like three tips or just even like to start with this on what they can be doing inside of their district to help prepare?
Yeah, I think the big thing is you’ve got to look at it in terms of being proactive instead of reactive. So look at your district. Ask yourself, are we being proactive? We’re putting technology into the hands of these students. What are we doing to prepare them for that? What are individual teachers doing to prepare them for that? So that would be the first thing I would do. The next thing I would do is probably look at the different attributes of digital citizenship and then kind of map it out into a curriculum in terms of, and it doesn’t have to be like, here’s your curriculum, boom, but hey, kindergarten through third-grade teachers, we want you to take on these three tenets of digital citizenship. So make yourself aware of these. Figure out ways you can embed them into what you’re teaching and go all the way up your curriculum and figure out how that is, how that’s going. And then thirdly, I would say, look for opportunities to get your parents invested in that, create what I like to call parent universities, because parents don’t even know what their kids are doing with technology a lot of the time.
So creating opportunities where you come in, where you have someone come in to the school and talk to them on when’s the right time to let your kid have a phone? Or what are the social media platforms that our kids are using right now? And I think what that does, you have hyper vigilant parents on both ends of the spectrum. Some of them are like, we just let them do whatever they want to do, and others are like, We’ve locked down everything, and they can’t do anything.
So your goal is trying to find the middle ground to help those parents through that as well. I think you’ve got a responsibility to the whole family in trying to figure that out as well. I go into schools a lot and try just to help them do that. So those would probably be the three things that I would suggest for a district to start with.
Awesome. Well, I love that, and thank you so much for all you’re doing for the future generation of teachers like I have you. Then another friend of mine, Marlo, has gone into higher ed to start continue teaching this and preparing, and it’s not going away technology is going to be you know so important 1 to 1 there’s going to be a device in students hands or starting pre-K, K, all the way through. So thank you so much for your service. Well, thank you to education technology also. Well, thanks so much for being on.
Have a good one.
Thank you very much.
In Episode 33, Hope Davis, MA, CHC takes us on a journey from personal challenges to leading educational innovation at Teach Tech U. Discover how her experiences fueled a passion for transformative technology in education, shaping the future with Project LEAR. An inspiring conversation for anyone intrigued by the power of tech to change lives. […]
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With guest speaker Marsha Maxwell, PhD, CETL, join us for a reflective journey on the advancements of AI through the years, focusing on how we can further develop these technologies to bridge educational divides.
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