Key Concept 9: Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship has been consistently stressed in multiple courses across the Educational Technology program with multiple assignments requiring us to promote aspects of digital citizenship to our fellow teachers as well as our teachers. Our first course had us work in groups to create a VoiceThread on a specific topic of digital citizenship. My group focused on Internet Safety, its importance and tools to help teach internet safety across multiple grade levels. In the next course we created larger lesson plans focusing on website evaluation as part of a digital literacy project. I have created infographics that help students develop healthy habits around using and abusing their devices. Finally, I led a discussion session that taught my fellow teachers how to scan technology platform websites for information about student and teacher data privacy and how to incorporate that information into the decision making process when thinking about using a new technology platform in the classroom.

Helping students grow into empowered users of technology in the future means knowing how to be a wise consumer of information as well as realizing that what you put on the internet never really goes away. My group's VoiceThread project on Internet Safety had a portion on digital footprint to help students and teachers understand the ramifications of what they put on the internet now coming back to haunt them in the future. This concept becomes even more important with older students who begin to use social media and might not be aware of the information and personal data that they freely share before realizing the importance of their privacy. If I were to redo this project now at the end of my program, I would place a greater emphasis on this aspect on Internet Safety and less on the "scary stranger online" aspect that often concerns parents of young students. To help students become lifelong wise consumers of information from the internet, our Digital Literacy project focused on teaching how to use specific website evaluation tools. This process helps students to pick out resources that have a higher level of veracity and will help them discern actual "fake news" and propaganda from simply controversial viewpoints, a lifelong skill that we are clearly in need of at this point in time.