Net Smart

     My biggest takeaway from reading Net Smart is knowing how to navigate the digital world and effectively communicate with others digitally.  According to Rheingold, in order to navigate the digital world and effectively communicate with others digitally, we must know the five literacies: attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network smarts.  I think the most important thing for attention literacy is being mindful of what you pay attention to online.  This leads to the next literacy of crap detection.  When navigating through the digital world effectively, you must look through resources and websites as a process of investigation in order to know what’s reliable or what’s crap.  Participation is another important literacy in navigating the digital world.  The most important takeaway with participation is knowing the difference between participating and passive consuming.  Participating incorporates learning the norms and boundaries of online culture.  Participation then leads to collaboration in the digital world.  Collaboration includes engaging in casual conversations and making those rules and boundaries clear when communicating online.  Finally, there’s network smarts.  My biggest takeaway with network smarts is that it’s important to participate in diverse networks because it provides a richer variety of resources.
    These five literacies directly impact my teaching because I will be teaching students digital citizenship and how to navigate the online world.  Part of that lesson includes teaching them about the five literacies.  I will teach the students about the literacies and model what those literacies look like online.  Students must not only hear about it but also see it in action in order to fully understand it.  With technology being all around us, and even more in the lives of the children, they must know how to navigate the digital world and how to effectively communicate with others online.