YouTube Video: Digital Citizenship: Integrated, not Added
Links:
Outcome Maps: SunWest School Division Outcome Maps
ISTE Article: Embed Digital Citizenship in All Subjects Areas
This was a really fun topic for me to cover. I’ve always been interested in how to teach our students how to live responsibly online, and as a health major I’ve also always taken an interest in personal wellness. The article posted above just felt like the perfect combination of the two!
As social media and our online lives become more prevalent, so does the need to protect our wellness. A big way that we can do that is to make sure students (and parents) are educated when it comes to digital citizenship and responsibility. The best way to do that is to “hack” the mandated outcomes to show just how important this topic is at this point in time.
I had a conversation with a colleague the other day who takes pictures around town and shares them with her kindergartens, asking them, “where’s the math?” We talked about how we can teach students to see math everywhere they look, and that it doesn’t have to be a scary subject. She shared with me that lots of her students go home to siblings who complain about how difficult math is, so she is working to change that mindset by sharing the beauty of math and how it is everywhere we look.
What does that have to do with anything? Well it got me thinking about digital citizenship. We are at the point where it is part of our lives, and we can see it everywhere we look. There are lots of people (myself included) who see the doom and gloom of social media and the online world, but that doesn’t mean we need to pass those negative views onto younger students. We can change the mindset and see it as a positive thing!
So let’s look at our outcomes and think… “where’s the digital responsibility?”