How does Digital Citizenship align with or fit into the Saskatchewan Curriculum?

Simple answer – it aligns in many ways.

Detailed answer – keep reading.

I believe that there is a time and a place for the digital world in a classroom and the more we rely on it in our society, the more it should be included in our teachings. Technology has opened a whole world of new potential skills to be learned, which again, means more things that can be taught in the walls of our classrooms!

While creating a lesson plan for another class, I had been going through the Grade 6 Social Studies curriculum and had noted the below, with the focus word being research:

I immediately assumed that outcome IN6.2(b),  the research of different cultures would be done through the use of technology – this may be because this is the norm that I have come to know and maybe because it is a much more effecicent type of research. I mean, we have the internet at the tips of our fingers and with some sort of tablet in majority of classrooms today – why not use it? As I mentioned earlier, as a society we rely on technology for things like this – so I think that there should be space to learn it in school, and learn how to do so correctly.

With keeping in mind that research on the internet can be a major information overload with both real and fake information, it is awfully important to help our students learn to decipher the difference. This leads me to my discussion on one of the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship –  Digital Fluency, helping our students build a foundation of tools on how to better navigate this information overload.

In my future classroom, I hope to have access to technology so that my students have the chance to explore the digital world and we can experiment with how it can best aid their learning. In particular I will teach Digital Fluency – this can be done in a few ways:

• Teaching students that the choices they make online should align with what they would decide “in real life”, meaning that I want to stress to students that though the digital world can provide a bit of anonymity – it does not mean there decisions will go without consequences, to themselves and others.
• There is good information and there is false information – it is important to know and understand the difference of what that might be and where you might find reliable information.