The best story I have ever heard about a student essay goes like this. Student (let's call her Jane) was tasked to write about an event that changed her life. In this essay, Jane wrote about the Champion Ship - not the championship, but literally, the "ship" of champions. I feel like I'm not off base here in assuming that sweet Jane had very likely never participated in a championship game. All along, Jane has been thinking that her friends are getting to go on this ship without her, so she made up her experience getting to board the Champion Ship. (Or maybe her parents just went on a cruise that summer, who am I to say). 

As silly as this essay story might be, it has always stuck with me. There's something in the metaphor about "getting on board. This year, I am boarding the Leader Ship. Getting on this ship means I am all in to set sail on a grand adventure of a new school year. I am ready to "Lead like a Pirate". I cannot wait to travel the 2019-2020 school year "seas" with an incredible crew. 

Leadership should be all about "getting on board" and doing #allthethings, so for me, this year, you won't just find me using leadership as a noun. It's not a thing that I am. It is a thing that I do. I am boarding this ship. I am excited to hoist these sails and see just how far this Leader Ship can take us this school year. 

If you asked my momma why her daughter became a teacher, I have a pretty strong feeling that she would chuckle a bit and say, "She loves school supplies." It's a little bit funny and a little bit true. I love school supplies. Something that I think is overlooked by many in the field of education is the value of a cute stapler or the perfect pen. It makes sense that a carpenter has a preferred brand of tools or that an electrician is partial to his favorite wire stripper. However, many times, teachers don't always treat themselves to the tools of their job that make their hearts happy. 

So, here are  my words of wisdom to keeping your "teacher tank" full:

1. Buy the pens! Get that polka-dotted stapler! Spend the extra couple bucks to get the cuter notebook. Choose to pick up the tools that will put a smile on your face each time that you use them. 
   
2. Small gestures communicate LOVE in big ways, so pay attention to your teacher friends go to supplies. Are they a flair felt tip medium pen user like me? Notice that and snag them the tropical pack next time you see it on sale. Is her room Dr. Seuss themes? Grab her those "Thing 1 & Thing 2" post-its from the dollar bin. Be the person that spreads a little bit of teacher supply love. 
   
3. Tell your students your favorite things in life and be grateful when they show up as a Christmas gift. I know so many teachers that spend lots of time, energy, and money on their students, but they feel so uncomfortable when the holidays roll around and gifts show up. Embrace it! It is how a student's parent is telling you thank you! 
4. And finally, give your kid's teacher a gift. At Christmas. During Teacher Appreciation. At random. Teachers (I think all people really) like to feel appreciated. Elementary teachers often spend more hours in a week with our kids than we do. Take the time to be thankful for them. A small gift and a quick card are and easy ways to show this. 

So, go to the nearby dollar store. Pick up that highlighter, and tell someone that they are the "bright spot" in your day. Happy living friends! :) 

Many children are scared of monsters: monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, monsters that creep into your room in the dark. Because of this fear, parents do a variety of things to make our children feel safe from these monsters that don't even exist. Look up "Monster Spray" on Pinterest, and you'll find a host of ideas for decorated spray bottles, essential oil calming sprays, and other do-it-yourself projects for protecting your children from these non-existent monsters. As little ones grow, the fear of  Boogie Man begins to lessen, and kids come to realize that there are no such things as monsters. The reality sets in that a creature that looks like Mike Wazowski from Disney's Monster's Inc. just  doesn't actually exist in our world.

While we have managed to teach the youth that monsters aren't real, what we have failed to do in this world is to properly prepare those children and young adults for the real life monsters that do creep and crawl everyday in the digital world. Cyberbullies are one of the monsters in the online world. While there are other kinds of scary and deadly monsters that lurk online, cyberbullies are often just kids themselves. Unlike most hackers and cyberpirates, cyberbullies do not always understand the consequences of their actions. These online bullies don't see the devilish monster looking back in the mirror. 

As educators, parents, and adult citizens, it is our responsibility to educate students about what cyberbullying is and to begin to create a culture that doesn't promote this kind of behavior. The government is sadly behind on what supports and legal mandates that schools and society needs to better take care of our youth in regards to this issue. The government does have some legal measures in place to require schools to educate students; however, these measures only apply to schools that "receive E-rate and other technology funds" (Protecting Children in the 21st Century, 2012). Additionally, the measures put in place by this Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), that was enacted by Congress in 2000, are superficial (2011) because there is no specific set of specific requirements, nor is there a need to prove that all students have been educated about "appropriate online behavior" ( Protecting Children in the 21st Century, 2012). These actions while well-intentioned are not enough and are already outdated. 

As a Texas educator, I would strongly advocate that our End of Course exams should be reevaluated and should push our students forward into the twenty-first century world that they are going to experience. For this reason, I suggest a set of required Digital Citizenship courses throughout Texas students' K-12 education and a culminating End of Course STAAR exam on these topics. While many opponents may argue that character education falls to students' parents, I contend that parents are working with outdated information themselves. How can we in good conscious ask parents to take the lead on something that they have never been educated in? My high school students' parents did not have social media or smartphone devices when they were in school, and therefore, parents are fundamentally unable to provide the quality of education on such a nuanced, complicated, and evolving topic like digital citizenship. 


References
Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). (2011). Federal Communications Commission. Retrieved 24 March 2018, from https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act

Protecting Children in the 21st Century. (2012). District Administration Magazine. Retrieved 24 March 2018, from https://www.districtadministration.com/article/protecting-children-21st-century

Copyright is a jungle; it is filled with clear streams, tangles of branches, sneaky animals, and a host of other rich metaphors for this difficult to grasp and wholly overwhelming topic. While some portions of copyright run clear like a blue stream of easy to understand transparency, other sections are like those tangled branches and filled with hard to judge, subjective lines that continue to change with the times.

While I feel as though I have only gleaned the most surface level understanding of copyright, fair use, and open sources, I, at very least, understand that the intricacies that go along with copyright are, in fact, their own industry. Because this is such a complicated and dense topic, entire careers are based on it. There are copyright librarians, copyright lawyers, and a host of other jobs associated with understanding and guiding others in the murky waters that can be the distinction between fair use and copyright infringement.

I learned that even copyrighted works can still often be used with appropriate credit (attribution), and art and music have taken on a whole new light, for me, as I understand that copyrighted works can be transformed into something new. (I am now humming Jay-Z's "Holy Grail" in my head and hearing his rap version of Kurt Cobain's famous lines from "Smells like Teen Spirit." Although, in that particular case, Jay-Z had after the fact permission from Courtney Love for the lines (Hogan, 2013). The line for what qualifies as transformational is so gray, and I, as an English teacher, love to hunt for the allusions and homages to other artists in music and art. That's probably why one of my biggest takeaways from the week involves 2 Live Crew. (Maybe honesty isn't always the absolute best policy.) In 1994, 2 Live Crew went to court over their use of the line “Oh, pretty woman, walking down the street.” (The line is from the famous Roy Orbinson song.) Ultimately, the Supreme Court determined that this was a fair transformative use because of the new meaning and direction (Stim). This is the part of copyright law that I do find utterly fascinating. 

The "Copyright Jungle" has so many other densely tangled elements like the industry tigers that fight the smaller prey in fierce copyright litigation. The music industry in the past has come down hard on copyright infringement. Remember Napster? "Napster and its founder held the promise of everything the new medium of the Internet encompassed: youth, radical change and the free exchange of information. But youthful exuberance would soon give way to reality as the music industry placed a bull's-eye squarely on Napster" (King, 2002). The emergence and continual updating of the internet and our digital access has called for changes in the way that copyright laws and rules function. The last two decades have called for new understandings and new changes to how things are licensed, permitted for use, and copyrighted. I don't foresee this overgrown "Copyright Jungle" becoming more clear to navigate in the near future. If anything, I can see that this jungle will continue to add more hazards, more questions, and more tricky to navigate situations. I guess we will all just have to stay tuned as new digital mediums emerge and evolve. 

References 

Hogan, M. (2013, June 21). Courtney Love blessed Jay-Z's 'magna carta' use of nirvana lyrics. Spin. Retrieved from https://www.spin.com/2013/06/courtney-love-jay-z-magna-carta-smells-like-teen-spirit-lyrics. 

King, B. (2002). The Day the Napster Died. WIRED. Retrieved 15 March 2018, from https://www.wired.com/2002/05/the-day-the-napster-died/.

Stim, R. (n.d). Fair use: what is transformative? NOLO. Retrieved from https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html.

English is a living language. It changes with time. New worlds are added the dictionary every year, and old words take on new meaning. In 2018, the word "instant" means something different than it once did. With our incredible access to technology and the internet, we have an expectation that instant means right now.

We want no time to lapse.
Click.
And there.
No loading. No refreshing. No waiting. 
Instant, instant. 

There was once a time in our not so distant past that "instant" meant the five minutes that it took to cook "instant mashed potatoes" or the five minutes that it takes to cook "instant rice." 

What has changed in our society to shift the instantaneousness of time from minutes to less than seconds? The level of access that the world has to the Internet has dramatically changed in the last decade thanks to the emergence of smartphones. We find ourselves increasingly dependent on technology. In fact "nomophobia," a fear of not being able to use a cell phone or other mobile device is on the rise (LaMotte, 2017). This constant need to be plugged into a world that responds instantly to our every question has revolutionized the way that we interact with each other and the world.

This instantaneous world that exists has created a "separate self" in the digital world. As a teacher, many times I see that students experience a bit of disconnect between who they seem to be in the "real world" versus who they are in the digital environment including social media. However, these two worlds coexist and overlap. Bosses, coaches, and others routinely Google search for potential employees or future players. Many people (adults and teenagers alike) are not always cognizant of the digital legacy that we call a "digital footprint" or "digital tattoo," and how that digital identity can follow them into their real life. 

Actions online are often viewed as a direct reflection of a person. An individual's "digital footprint" may be a positive or a negative, and much like a resume, a person has to work to cultivate a digital footprint that is indicative of how the individual would like to be perceived in the world. Educators should begin to teach students directly how to do this with specific lessons and instructions. It is silly to assume that everyone understands how easy it is to find a person's "digital footprint." People, especially our teenagers, feel anonymous because they hide behind a username or some other identity, but they often forget about shared connections like mutual friends, location tags, media posts, and other identifying features included in their online actions. 

Because "instant mashed potato" mindset of everything at our fingertips right now doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, we need to reflect and continue to push the conversations with society and education about what, who, and how we are in the digital world. Parents need to be encouraged to have conversations with their children about online safety. Teacher preparation programs need to include considerations for the digital environment that exists, and a plethora of other industries that need to consider how things have shifted, changed, and morphed in this last decade. 

References 
LaMotte, Sandee. (2017, December 1). "Smartphone addiction could be changing your brain." CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/30/health/smartphone-addiction-study/index.html. 

We are nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, and already we have seen the world shift and evolve in ways that few could have predicted. When the clock rolled over from 1999 to 2000, my best friend’s dad was left with a closet full of grain sacks and a shed full of water barrels. It’s laughable because the world has changed many times over since those days, and that wasn’t even terribly long ago. Thanks to the quickly changing landscape of time and technology, we are left to grapple with new complexities and new challenges that didn’t exist in the twentieth century.

As humans learn to navigate this ever-changing world, we are posed with new terms and new definitions that leave us uncertain in many ways because we cannot fully see the outcomes for those things which we are determining. Things that were simple and definable like citizenship now exist in a shade of gray. What does it meant to be a citizen versus a digital citizen? Are they the same? Are they related? Or are we stealing terminology where new terms should exist? 

While Terry Hieck points out, citizenship and digital citizenship are “nearly the same thing” (2018), I believe that nearly is not enough. In fact, many scholars have pointed out that: “the very broadness of the term digital citizenship … presents an issue” (Polgar & Curran, 2015). The vagueness of the term forces us to look more specifically at the differences between the two terms.

Citizenship is defined merely as “a member of a community” (citizenship, 2018). However, I argue that digital citizenship is a significantly more weighty and complex term, and that in fact, citizenship and digital citizenship are not the same. Because understanding the concept of what is means to be a digital citizen “requires a certain level of background” (Polgar & Curran, 2015), I argue that a there are merely connected terms as best. The idea of digital citizenship incorporates a layering of terms like tech etiquette, responsible use, cyberbullying, and so many others that I believe this is not a straightforward or easily definable term. Our anchor text on this topic, “Digital citizenship in schools: Nine elements all students should know,” points out that “Digital citizenship is about the changing nature of students and people in general with the rise of technology” (Ribble, 2015). This constant need for change and updating leads me to believe that the definition of digital citizenship should also be a living term that is updated to match the status and need of the times constantly and continually.

Thus my personal definition of digital citizenship is:

A set of character values to be exhibited in any digital/online setting that promote positive interactions with all people in the efforts of creating an online environment filled with integrity and responsibility.

References

citizenship. 2018. In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved February 24, 2018, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker.

Curran, M. (2012, June). iCitizen: Are you a socially responsible digital citizen. Paper presented at the International Society for Technology Education Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX. Retrieved from http://www.gonevirtual.org/uploads/6/0/8/6/6086473/icitizen_iste12_paper.pdf (PDF: icitizen_paper_M_Curran.pdf ).

Heick, T. (2008). “The Definition of Digital Citizenship.” TeachThought. Retrieved on Februrary 21, 2018 from https://www.teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/the-definition-of-digital-citzenship.

Polgar, D. R., & Curran, M. B.F.X. (2015). We shouldn't assume people know what digital citizenship is. Retreived fromhttp://www.teachthought.com/technology/we-shouldnt-assume-people-know-what-digital-citizenship-is/.

Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: Nine elements all students should know. (3rd ed.) [Kindle Version]. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology.

​This is a silly thing; in fact, I almost feel guilty calling it a tip. However, I really do feel like it's one of those easy things that teachers forget about. Put the tissues, the hand sanitizer, the student supplies, and the band-aids on the opposite side of the room from you. You don't need students sanitizing, sneezing, or bleeding on your desk. Just food for thought my friends.