Prompt: How can I teach digital citizenship as it relates to digital communication? Being a citizen in the digital community comes with rights and responsibilities. Even though most of our students are spending hours everyday online for school, socializing, research, shopping, entertainment and more, we don’t always do a good job implicitly teaching them what it means to be a good digital citizen. Especially because there are huge safety issues as young people jump onto the world wide web, we as educators have to teach digital citizenship with the same priority and passion that we have for our content areas. At my school like many others, we have 4 core values to guide our Redwood community as far as citizenship which are: Be Safe, Be Respectful, Be Responsible, and Be Kind. Most kids at my school can recite these to you and we spend time at the start of the year explaining what that means and how it looks on our campus. As I researched digital citizenship, I could see the parallels between digital citizenship and my school’s core values. As I teach digital citizenship to my students, I want them to see the connections to our school wide values. In the Nine P’s of Digital Citizenship on Edutopia, Vicki Davis refers to Anne Collier, a cultural artist, who thinks we should drop the “digital” in digital citizenship. Being a citizen in the digital age means being able to navigate our online communities as well as our real world communities safely, respectfully, and responsibly. I think teaching digital citizenship at the same time we teach our school core values and revisiting it throughout the year makes sense. I think that digital citizenship should be taught in layers. The first layer should be a core of safety. What do kids need to know to safely be a part of the digital age? This is where Vicki Davis would educate students about passwords, personal information, private information, and personal photos that may reveal your location or other private information. Since we are focusing on digital communication, how can students safely communicate with other people in their community? Once kids know how to be safe online, they also need to know how to be respectful, which would include communicating respectfully and respecting other people’s ideas and asking permission and giving credit when using theri ideas. Vicki Davis stresses professionalism in communication and “netiquette”. The BBC has a great list of netiquette rules that I linked in. The third layer of digital citizenship would fall under responsibility. Students need to consider their digital footprint and reputation. Davis refers to it as a “personal brand”. How do students want to be perceived online? Are they being responsible and true to who they really are? Finally the last layer would be kindness. As we communicate and collaborate online, are we being kind to each other and considering other people’s feelings as we share ideas and work on projects together. One way I am making digital citizenship personal for my students is by having them help create our digital agreements. These are procedures and expectations we created during the first few weeks of school. It includes netiquette ideas like having your camera on & mic muted, being respectful & helpful in the chat, how to email teachers and other students, and how to share documents for projects. Another way I can make digital citizenship personal for my student is by having a weekly TRUTH of FICTION news articles. This is another idea from Vicki Davis. She finds stories about scams on Snopes and shares them with her kids. They have to be detectives and find out if the claims are true. Having my students educate older neighbors and grandparents about preventing identity theft and how to spot scams would also make the learning very personal.
4 Comments
Kelly Wehrley
9/29/2020 10:22:49 pm
Hi Betsy,
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Abie Gottfried
9/30/2020 04:15:36 pm
I love the idea of doing some kind of truth or fake type assignment with students, having them analyze profiles, or articles. I think BBC did an article which is a test to see if you can figure out if an account is a fake one, or real, and that could be a fantastic tool for the lesson. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38005844
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Scott Marsden
9/30/2020 05:43:57 pm
Betsy,
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Kimberlee
10/14/2020 07:03:55 pm
Betsy,
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AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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