This year I decided that I am going to have all of my students sign up for a Dropbox and Google account, if they don't already have one, as their first assignment. I am teaching five geography classes and the student government course this year. As part of their intro to these new programs I am going to have them go to my school site and fill out a Google form. This will ask basic info and allow me to collect their new gmails.
I will be using Canvas Instructure this year which has a lot of great tools, but there are many different platforms you could use. I am going to create a course page for each class and then import their emails to invite them.
Their first task, to get them more accustomed to the tools and especially each other, will be to create a 140 character bio and put it on the message board. I will have mine on each page as an example. They will be able to comment on each others as well. Not all the students use twitter, but since we are a 140 character society I thought this would be a good, fun way for each student to introduce themselves and get to know each other and our platform.
We will discuss proper netiquette and safety before I turn them loose. There are many ways to have your students introduce themselves, for me this accomplishes a lot of things at once and will be engaging and fun for all.
Thank you for sharing your netiquette lessons. I created it and I am going to follow your lessons. I will sign up for a Dropbox account later this week. This is a great blog post because you don't tell anyone what to do. You tell them what you are doing. Awesome! Please remind students to back up all data stored in the cloud on the ground as well. It's good netiquette.
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