So I’m sitting outside reflecting on some of the articles, thinking about digital citizenship and how I might approach it in my future classroom. I started thinking what grade should we be introducing these 9 elements of digital citizenship. When I was in school, I never learned about anything related to the 9 elements. Now there was restrictions but we as students were never really educated on the digital world. The digital world is such a big of our lives now, we need to educate our students about the digital world throughout their educational journey.
The main question from the one article “Character Education for the Digital Age” by Jason Ohler is “should we teach our kids to have two lives or one?” This is a question I had to sit on for awhile. I am someone who struggles with the amount of technology kids are using today. What I am coming to understand, is that it is better to educate our students throughout their educational journey with digital citizenship to help them properly utilize the tool of the digital world. If I want to answer the question of two lives or one, I am going to lean towards one. For my future classroom, I envision the “one life” approach where mixing their digital experiences with their learning and understanding of community, values, and responsibility.
To break it down, I believe it is important to teach digital citizenship. If we are teaching our students about right and wrong in our classrooms, we need to teach the right and wrongs of the online world.