Digital Citizenship In My Future Classroom

This week, we dove into digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is the ability to use technology responsibly and safely. According to Ribble, digital citizenship also means to lead and assist others in building positive digital experiences, recognize that our actions have consequences to others and to participate in a manner for the common good. In my future classroom, I plan to integrate digital citizenship education through a practical approach. I will use the 9 elements of digital citizenship to ensure students develop the knowledge and skills to navigate online spaces responsibly and safely. 

 

1. Digital Access 
   • I would start by trying to ensure that all students in my classroom have access to digital tools. For students that don’t have access to digital tools, I will try to provide those digital resources for them to use during school hours or at lunch time where and when it is possible. 
2. Digital Commerce
   • Students may be doing some online shopping so teaching them about digital commerce is important. I would use maybe one class to teach about secure online purchasing, talk about what cards to use for purchases, and identify safe and secure sites to purchase off of if they were to do so. 
3. Digital Communication
   • In my classroom, I will talk about different ways of using digital communication in a respectful way. As a class, we can focus on email etiquette, using discussion boards in class, looking at blogs and critiquing ePortfolios online. 
4. Digital Literacy
   • As a class, we will look at different websites to evaluate if the source is reliable. This is where we will look for credible information. I would encourage students to verify sources before believing that everything is true. I would make students do some sort of research project on this to deepen their knowledge.
5. Digital Etiquette
   • In my classroom, I will discuss with my class the importance of being respectful online, not interacting with cyberbullying and responding appropriately to disagreements or negative comments. 
6. Digital Law
   • Students will need to understand the legalities of things online. I would emphasize to my students the importance of giving credit, citing sources and understanding copyright laws. I would teach a lesson on plagiarism and talk about the consequences of digital misconduct. 
7. Digital Rights and Responsibility
   • In my classroom, I would take online privacy very seriously. For example, if students don’t want to be photographed and posted on the school’s Instagram page while doing an experiment in the classroom then I won’t take a picture of them. 
8. Digital Health and Wellness
   • Spending a lot of time on your phone can really play a huge role on a student’s mental health. I think that including screen time goals as a class would be a good way to get students off their phones. This would be an incentive to monitor phone screen time.
9. Digital Security
   • Teaching students about how to incorporate personal security measures on their electronic devices is an important. I would emphasize to not use the same passwords for all accounts on everything. I want to share stories about hackers and cyber attacks and explain that this can happen anywhere, even on devices at school. I want to emphasize the importance of not clicking links from unknown sources. I want to teach how to prevent those attacks. For example, learning how to block senders, report to junk and restrict profiles on social media and topics that will be covered in a class.

For my teaching approach, I really want to emphasize talking about cyberbullying and sexting. This is such a prevalent thing in this age that just won’t go away. It is part of our job as teachers to help students question the digital world while they are using it. I will show videos about the consequences of sexting and dispersing those sexts around to other people. Having students watch real-life examples will really impact them. 

I want to emphasize to my students the importance of putting the phone down. In the article called, “The IRL Fetish”, they talk about how good we feel about ourselves when we put our phones down and log off. We shouldn’t obsess over not being on our phones. We should just be logging off when the situations we are in call us to log off. I want to use real-life situations to show to my students the importance of turning off phones and just enjoying life. I would do this by taking students on a walk in nature without phones so they can just enjoy it or have a pizza party with the class without phones just so everyone can enjoy the party without having to post or text anyone about it.

 

Using my teaching platform, I want to embed digital citizenship into my curriculum rather than just treating it like a one off type of thing. By doing this, it will reinforce the importance of digital citizenship and help students begin to build foundations for their responsible digital behavior.