Honestly, before taking this course, I never gave much thought to my digital identity. I was married at 24 and raised three kids before getting back into the workforce in 2014. Being a stay-at-home-mom, I wasn’t closely following the new technology trends. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was about 29 years old, and still it was just a flip phone. I had a Facebook account and was going to delete it until a long-lost friend contacted me through the app. I was hooked after that and thought it was super fun to be able to say things to my friends even though I was at home alone with my babies.

As I mentioned once in a Twitter post, I like to make people laugh, often at my own expense. I really have no shame, so am totally willing to put myself out there to get a good laugh. Things I posted on Facebook were definitely TMI, sometimes crude, often inappropriate, but always funny (IMO). I’m sure I’ve posted some things that were offensive to others, though my intention has never been to hurt anyone as I believe a laugh at the expense of others is the lowest form of comedy.

When I finally started teaching in 2014, I knew the old adage that “we are teachers out of school too” – we have to watch what we say and do in public as well as at school. I didn’t really consider my online presence and actually was a little miffed that it seemed like I couldn’t really be myself anywhere. When I got a permanent position teaching, the superintendent that hired me reminded me that our online presence was important as well. I finally went on to Facebook and deleted any inappropriate pictures of myself and asked others to untag me or take the pictures down. I have slowly been “cleaning up” my digital identity as I do want it to match who I am on the “outside”.

On page 9 of the Digital Citizenship Education in Saskatchewan Schools document, the authors speak about the “one-life” concept where our online and offline lives should not be considered separate from each other. We are indeed only living one life and both worlds are integral to and equally affect our identities; what we do and say online should match what we do and say offline.

With recent events taking place across Canada and the globe, I have been thinking a lot about people and their Digital Identities. I’ve had to block people I consider my friends because I strongly disagree with how they conduct themselves online. I make a point not to engage with political talk on my social media networks; I use these apps to connect with friends, not yell about my political, religious, and other beliefs. What I’m seeing is a generation of people (mine) that were never really taught how to properly conduct themselves online. A lot of us are slowly figuring it out, but many are potentially hurting themselves and relationships they have because of the false power and anonymity they think they have from posting in online forums.

If we as teachers, parents, grandparents, etc. are expected to teach digital citizenship skills to our youth, we need some serious lessons in how to be good citizens ourselves. School administrators have a responsibility to ensure their staff have a solid understanding of what Digital Citizenship is and have looked hard at their own digital identities before they approach the subject with their students.

Full disclosure – I have not done much work on my Major Project in the past couple of weeks. We’ve been fighting Covid in our home and our school and it has been busy and overwhelming. Our school had to transition to online classes again for a week, driving home again the reality of Mike Ribble’s first of the Nine Elements of Digital Literacy (2019), Digital Access. I live in a rural area that Sasktel has decided only Hillbillies inhabit and do not need access to proper internet. As such, I was forced to increase my cell phone data limit to be able to teach and learn online throughout the week. This is just me, the teacher; my students and their families also face the same problem. Though my Major Project will not focus on this aspect of Digital Literacy, it is very real for my students and I.

I have downloaded the Tik Tok app and have painstakingly been learning that, in order to access content I am actually interested in seeing, I must watch what seems like endless videos of teenagers saying and doing the most bizarre and witless things, so I can tell the app I am “not interested”. I have tried searching for things that interest me, and have made some progress with this, but am mainly getting videos of cute puppies now. I am still looking for educational content and am wondering if it exists on Tik Tok. I have received a “Welcome” email from the app and look forward to perusing the privacy policy, help, and safety links provided in the email.

As far as Flip Grid goes, I have not begun my exploration. I have used the website before, but need a good refresher. I have a team project coming up next week in another course I am taking and have suggested we use Flip Grid to present our content. I told them I would set everything up so I can kill two birds with one stone and get a refresher course while getting some homework done. I am anxious to get into this as I’d like to use it with my students.

Of Ribble’s Nine Elements of Digital Literacy, the 5 that I believe I will focus on the most include Digital Communication and Collaboration, Digital Etiquette, Digital Health and Welfare, Digital Rights and Responsibility, and Digital Security and Privacy. Naturally, just by doing the project, I hope to expand greatly on my own digital fluency, the fifth element. These 5 elements are the ones that interest me the most because, for me, they are the ones most pertinent to a healthy mind and body when it comes to youth and their online lives. Admittedly, the online world scares me a little. Through this project, I hope to gain a good enough understanding of it that I feel at ease using it, comfortable talking about it with my students, and at ease with what my own kids are doing in a world where I feel I have little to no control.

So much has changed in the past couple of years since the pandemic first shut down schools in March of 2020. Traditional schooling as we know it was halted overnight and a new way of delivering curricula was introduced. For most kids, remote learning included a combination of online meetings with their teacher and classmates, and individual work at home. Universities and colleges also turned to online learning. Most can agree that it was a struggle for all involved; teachers, students, and parents all felt the pressure to try to keep up with schoolwork while blindly trying to navigate a new way of learning/teaching that had been thrust upon them.

Since students and teachers have returned to the classrooms, learning and teaching have and will forever remain changed. Some parents have chosen to continue with their children’s online learning as they wait-out the pandemic. Many parents have turned to homeschooling their children as an alternative to sending them to school where they could potentially contract the Covid-19 virus, or to avoid the many restrictions set out by government and school divisions.

Any way you look at it, school has changed. The pandemic has laid bare several factors that have and have not been working in academics. It is now time for educators and policy makers to take what we have learned and apply it to how we want education to look like in the future.

One of the factors that mosts need to (and has already begun to) change is the skills needed to be successful in the areas of teaching and learning. In their report Future Work Skills 2020, the Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute names some of these skills including cross-cultural competency, new media literacy, and computational thinking. Cross-cultural competency refers to the “ability to operate in different cultural settings” (p.9). This skill is imperative as students are making online connections across the globe and need to have the abilities to not only communicate with people in other countries, but the knowledge and understanding to do so in a respectful and successful manner. Teachers too need to possess these skills as they welcome an increasingly more diverse student population to their schools. New media literacy means the “ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication” (p.10). Media is changing in the blink of an eye. Both educators and students alike need to have the capacity to navigate these new media and use them to their advantage. Computational thinking includes the “ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning” (p.10). Such a skill will be top of the list for future employers looking for job candidates. Honestly, I have a hard time understanding this concept myself – a skill that I must work on if I am to help harness it within my students.

Since the pandemic began, we’ve done a lot of looking back, yearning for a time when things were “normal”. It is now time to look ahead and get excited about where we will be going and start defining a new normal.

I have chosen to take a “Personal journey into media” for my major project for this course. I feel that taking on this project will best allow me to really understand my students (not to mention my kids!) and how they interact with others using social media.

I feel that to teach digital citizenship, and to perhaps someday provide leadership to my colleagues in the subject, I need to know on a deeper level what being a good digital citizen means. I think that by exploring some of the most popular applications that kids are using, (and many adults too) such as Instagram and TikTok, I will gain a deeper knowledge into their digital lives and be in a better position to guide them with their media literacy and digital citizenship.

I also plan on investigating the Flipgrid platform as part of my research as an educational tool that can be used in class. We all know that our students’ interests lie heavily in the online world. By incorporating some of these more “educational” platforms into our everyday teaching, it will allow us to better connect with our students in ways that are familiar and important to them.

I know I have a lot of work to do as I am more or less a social media virgin. My experiences with social media include scrolling Facebook and rarely posting pictures to Snapchat or Instagram. It will be an exciting and enriching experience and I look forward to it. My kids on the other hand, think it’s totally weird that Mom is going to be using TikTok!