Mandated Digital Citizenship Education In Our Schools

The first time I remember talking about something even remotely close to ‘cyber safety’ and digital citizenship was in grade 6. In my classrooms, I had been using computers since about grade 2 and iPads since I was in grade 4. However my grade 6 cyber safety talk was mostly your teacher and the school division can see what you search up on school computers and when connected to school wifi so do not do or search anything inappropriate while at school (what was inappropriate was not really explained to us). 

The first time I remember actually talking directly about cyber safety and cyberbullying was in about grade 8. To put that into perspective, I started grade 8 in 2016. I was already 13 years old and had both Instagram and Snapchat for just a little over a year at that point. I was in grade 4 when I first downloaded the messaging app Kik on my iPod touch I had gotten for my 9th birthday (here is a quick overview if you do not know what kik was). Safe to say the cyber safety talks should have happened a lot sooner. 

I also want to mention that throughout my schooling most of our cyber safety talks were whole school, kindergarten to grade 12, assemblies where we usually watched a pink shirt day videos, or other cyber bullying videos on YouTube. However, we had one legitimate digital citizenship talk in grade 5 during our puberty unit in health class. In this traumatic lesson, our teacher decided to create a hypothetical in which I was the main character. In this hypothetical, our teacher said I drank too many “pepsi” (she said pepsi while hinting that she meant alcohol) at a party and I got onto a table and took off my shirt and flashed everyone. Then a classmate at this hypothetical party took pictures of me shirtless and sent them to everyone in the school. After this lesson I had to endure comments from the guys in my class saying things like “oh we should get Alannah a case of pepsi to see if it’ll happen again” or “I wonder if ______ still has that picture”. This was one of the worst ways that teacher could have went about of teaching cyber safety, as it lead to a couple months of comments that I had to deal with. 

Most of my cyber safety and digital citizenship education unfortunately came from things happening to me or around me regarding technology. For example, I learnt I should never send nude pictures to anyone on the internet, after listening to a group of the guys in my school talk about, compare, and show each other nudes that girls had sent them and that they kept in their ‘secret calculator’ apps. I also learnt that you have to be extremely careful of the things you do or wear when other people are around because everyone has their phones, everyone also has a camera in the palm of their hands at all times after the girls in my highschool found out the boys were taking pictures of our butts in the hallways and classrooms and sending them to their group chats. And I learnt that people will try to blame the victim after I sat in classroom with with a teacher, our principal and my classmates while the guy defended theirs or their friends actions because the girls in the pictures were wearing leggings or after the principal threatened to make them ineligible for graduation scholarships and they got mad at the girl who was brave enough to tell the school what was happening. And unfortunately most children learn the same way I did. 

That’s why I strongly believe that digital citizenship should become a part of the curriculum starting in kindergarten so it is mandatory for teachers to teach it. I think both the dangers and benefits of technology should be taught. I think children should be taught both appropriate and inappropriate social media and technology usage. As future teachers, this responsibility will fall to us as much as we don’t want it to.