Educators are now facing pressures to weave digital citizenship into their classrooms even though the mandated curriculum has not yet caught up to the digital age in which we operate. The article Character Education for the Digital Age written by Jason Ohler talks about the “two lives” perspective,
"Students should live a traditional, digitally unplugged life at school and a second, digitally infused life outside school."
I don’t love the idea of completely unplugging in school, I think there are so many advantages to technology in the classroom if we are being smart about the ways in which we are incorporating it.
The Government of Saskatchewan has laid out a Digital Citizenship Continuum (K-12) which touches on:
Digital Etiquette
Digital Access
Digital Law
Digital Communication
Digital Commerce
Digital Rights & Responsibilities
Digital Health & Wellness
After reading this government document, I think I want to incorporate these pieces into my future classroom. I really like the way this document lays out the Essential questions and the KUDs for each of these important digital topics. One of the biggest challenges is adding digital citizenship into an already jam-packed curriculum. I think teaching digital citizenship is an extremely relevant and important aspect to incorporate into any classroom. It might be beneficial to plan out incorporating these digital citizenship pieces in collaboration with other curriculum outcomes. Perhaps we are heading into a research project in a grade 7 classroom, this might be a good time to incorporate a lesson on digital literacy. Or perhaps we are learning about rights and privileges in social studies class, we could weave in a lesson on digital rights and responsibilities smoothly.
Most of my time so far has been spent in middle-years classrooms. I stumbled upon a great YouTube video series produced by Common Sense Education that is specific for middle-years classrooms (I’ll share one of the videos from this series below). They also have a video series specific to elementary
The Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship tie in nicely with the Digital Citizenship Continuum developed by the Saskatchewan Government.
I think it would be cool to do a digital citizenship tradeshow in a middle-school classroom and divide the class into nine small groups. Each group is responsible for researching their assigned element and presenting it in a creative digital manner to our class on the tradeshow day. This would allow the students to do some research, work collaboratively, and do peer teaching.
References
Ohler, Jason. “Character Education for the Digital Age.” ASCD, 2011, www.ascd.org/el/articles/character-education-for-the-digital-age.
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