I believe there are many ways to approach digital citizenship in the classroom, which involves integrating the Ribble’s nine elements. I primarily work with high school students, I hope that over their years in school they have learned about digital safety, and responsibility, but these are still things I would integrate into an early lesson to refresh their memories. I am currently teaching in a supportive role, but when I did my internship I taught 2 sections of Health 9. The Health curriculum offers a lot of opportunity to discuss internet safety and students digital citizenship. There is a Decision making outcome where you could incorporate activities to enhance students understanding of the importance of online safety. I also believe these can be integrated when discussing your classroom expectations at the beginning of the year then you can have them posted up in your classroom as a visual reminder.
I am also a firm believer that connecting content to real life experiences make it easier for students to comprehend the importance of the matter. For example, when I was in high school and a physical fight broke out at lunch, students would crowd around to watch it and record the situation. Having discussions about these scenarios, without outing students of coarse are realistic examples for students to reflect on. At one school I was at we also had a student snapchat having a fake gun that was painted to look real while at school. This snapchat story flooded through the students at school. Word got to admin very quickly and the situation was handled. In this scenario there are both pros and cons. This is a great example as to how fast things can spread over social media and technology, but this was also a great resource for admin to handle a situation before anything serious happened.
There are many ways to teach these 9 concepts in the classroom, and I think you need to adapt your lessons to your current classroom. Whether this includes small and large group discussions, role-playing, case-studies, or project based assessments, you can tailor the content to have your students think critically about the scenarios. You could also break students into groups to create a carousel activity. Each group has to research and create a small poster about one of the nine elements. Then once one group is an expert in their element groups walk around and learn about the remaining 8.
