Safe to share? Or not safe to share? That is the question. At least that’s the question I posed to all fourth, fifth, and sixth graders when we started our digital citizenship unit last month. Responses ranged from “no way” to “that’s totally safe” to “it depends” as students traded stories and lively discussion echoed off the walls of the library. And, while most students agreed that it was not safe to share their picture, name, telephone number, or address with the public (I used “world” and “public” interchangeably to get that message across), what they didn’t know was that they may be sharing these things already, unintentionally.

In a previous blog article, I had shared how communication and collaboration are critical 21st century skills. Communication, one of the 4 Cs to 21st century skills, is defined as the ability to share thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions. Collaboration,  another of the 4 Cs to 21st century skills, is defined as the ability to work together to reach a goal while putting one's talent, expertise, and knowledge in action. Based on these two definitions, you can see how communication and collaboration have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship--they truly rely on each other and are mutually beneficial to all. But have you ever stopped to think about what communication really means?...

It was a week long in-person summer professional development workshop held by CSforMA, a Massachusetts Computer Science institute offering "train-the-trainer courses in emerging technologies," where I learned about the 4 Cs to 21st Century Skills. I had  previously been following Rita King, the executive vice president of Science House and senior fellow at a NASA think tank, and was inspired by an interview in which she spoke of an age of imagination being this major economic shift, and how our education system is failing to prepare students for this shift...