How To Be Your Own Robo-Cop

In my experience, cyber safety and digital citizenship was very much positioned as an add on to curriculum rather than an integral part of it. Oftentimes, we were told to exercise empathy both in person and online. I think most people my age can vividly remember a class discussion about the Amanda Todd story and how cyberbullying is a real threat to our development. However, we never really told how to recognize it or how to walk away from it.

I think many people can recall a time where they or a friend told a teacher that they were being bullied in some form and having both people punished. When you really think about it, this makes absolutely no sense. Not only does it not let students understand the consequences of their actions, but it discourages students from speaking against harassment and bullying. This approach was merely adapted to cyberbullying and was nothing but a senseless form of reprehension.

At the time, cyberbullying took centre stage when talking about technology. This left very little room to talk about how to use online resources, verifying their credibility, or even understanding how our social positions affected our relationship with technology. It was only through conversing with classmates and finding credible sources myself that I learned how to be responsible with my internet presence and usage. However, this isn’t the case with many people my age and education failed them in that aspect.

If I were to organize how digital citizenship is taught, I would make it integral to all content I may teach. As a math major, I can incorporate technology to show students how to solve problems they don’t understand and how to interpret results. From there, I could show them how it’s more important that they understand how they got the correct answer, whether it was organically found or through online resources, than to get the correct answer at all. This then leads to conversations about plagiarism and copyright. There are so many ways that we as educators can incorporate technology into our pedagogies and curriculums, we just have to be adaptive and open-minded to discover them