Digital Citizenship2/13/2018 The Prompt: Given your students’ grade level and the subject matter you teach, consider how you can teach digital citizenship and specifically digital citizenship as it relates to to digital communication. Please provide 3 specific examples on how you might make learning digital citizenship personal for your students.
As a high school principal we elect to explicitly teach the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship at the onset of 9th grade as, we believe, couching the elements in subjects has the potential impact of diluting the content and implications of failing to know and recognize the fallout for poor digital citizenship. This is not to say that the themes are not reinforced within subjects, but rather we work to be very upfront about our expectations for the 4 years they are in high school - and beyond. Specific to the notion of Digital Communication, I fall back to the pre-Instagram notion of audience. Buried within all of us is a level of impurity tempered by the fear of public reprisal, i.e., the reason I don't post my most visceral reactions and beliefs about "things" is because I have an intimate relationship built and molded through context and experience. This is nothing new. What is new is the conflicting message within out society with near complete permissiveness regarding what is socially acceptable countered by fickle notions of appropriateness depending by the viewing eye, a.k.a., audience. Also, and in regards to constructive communication, there is an old adage that reads, "Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people." In an unfettered internet there is no way to dictate the topic du jour and thus we will continue to be on the receiving end of negative outcomes. Hey, maybe ending net neutrality will not be such a bad thing? So, how do we make it personal (3 ways)?
4 Comments
Scott Marsden
2/13/2018 06:14:32 pm
Ben--I would be interested to hear what curriculum your school uses to teach the 9 elements of digital citizenship. Do you use Commons Sense Media, for example, or other curriculum? What resources from the iCARE did you find relevant to your situation, as a high school principal?
Benjamin Scinto
2/14/2018 12:34:22 pm
My library media specialist creates the lessons and assessments, pulling from various sources, many of which are listed in your iCARE. In terms of what I found relevant for my situation was the ISTE scope and sequence which we have adopted as a district, the new york times article about Harvard acceptance and rejection, and the 9 Ps - not just because I am a fan of alliteration, but because it differentiates between experiential and proactive knowledge
Kayla Bryant
2/13/2018 11:10:55 pm
I think what you said about audience is really important, and something many students will struggle with today growing up in the world of instagram and snapchat. They're encouraged to share every detail of their lives with a seemingly endless audience of people they do or do not know, but at the same time keep up an image. I am thankful I grew up pre-instagram and hope that we can continue educating students to know what is safe and acceptable to share online, and what is inappropriate for a variety of reasons.
Jeff Albertazzi
2/13/2018 11:45:31 pm
I wish we would explicitly teach digital citizenship at our middle school. I think this is the most important age as they have no clue of the digital footprint they are leaving. I really like the 3 ways to make it personnel I wonder how may kids really know what their digital profile is let alone how it is formed. What about the high school kids mentoring the middle School kids? Leave a Reply. |
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