Planning & Teaching Resources 2022

Class Digital Citizenship Agreements

Keypoints in developing a class digital agreements:

• Phase statement in the positive Eg. - Be kind online NOT - No cyberbullying, We want a list of do's not a list of dont's.

• Take ideas from students experiences or use scenarios to prompt students thinking. Eg. Has anyone ever tried to buy something online? What happened? Did you need help? Who did you ask? or Eg. Have you ever received a message online that has been confusing or offencive? What did you do? or Eg. Peter Parker created a new gaming account and used his name as the username and password. Was this a good idea? What could happen to his account? What could he have done differently?

• Use the Common Sense themes as prompts for ideas. Do one or two initial lessons to get students to start thinking about Digital Citizenship before brainstorming ideas for their class agreement.

• Make this part of your beginning of the year class agreement/treaty. Set the digital ground rules for the beginning of the year. Try and include the DC ideas that are most important to your students and their level. Make your agreement/treaty is flexible enough so ideas can be added during the term if necessary.

• Make sure it is easily understandable for all students. Use kids speak. The more ownership your students have the better.

Scratch Community Guidlines have been writing by the Scratch Team they are a DC guide for all Scratch users. These would be worth sharing with your upper and middle school learners. You could ask your students, what guidlines would be useful in our classroom?