Digital Citizenship
What is Digital Citizenship?
Digital citizenship covers a wide range of materials. According to the Common Sense Media website, "Being a good digital citizen is more than knowing your way around the web. It's about connecting and collaborating in ways you didn't even know were possible." Digital citizenship lessons will not only help student be safe, respectful, and responsible online; they will also help students develop research and literacy skills to help them learn how to distinguish between good and bad information online.
Why Digital Citizenship?
The amount of material that must be covered each year is overwhelming, and it seems impossible to include one more thing. In the case of digital citizenship, it is easier to pretend it will be covered through our student's regular online interactions or other adults in their lives. Unfortunately, many adults are not very good digital citizens either. Our students will be interacting more and more online. We need to prepare them to be successful in life in all areas of their lives and avoid the pitfalls that adults even fall into online.
The practical reason for the importance of digital citizenship is that some school funding is tied to instruction. This means that we must provide proof that we have digital citizenship lessons included in our schools to maintain those funds. Each teacher will be provided with a form to turn into the office to show they have covered digital citizenship with their classes.
The How of Digital Citizenship
Common Sense Media has a massive library of lessons set up by grade level. These lessons include classroom activities as well as online games to play. I will compile the activities here by grade level with suggestions for how to pair the lessons with PBIS. Each set of activities is aligned to Common Core ELA standards as well as ISTE technology standards.
Google has a fun interactive game to help teach digital citizenship. With its included curriculum, students will enjoy learning important skills in the online world.