Week 6

Activity 6.3 Digital Citizenship Reflection

1.    How should teachers promote and model digital citizenship responsibly?

It's definitely hard for teachers from my generation to think about digital citizenship because we are so immersed in the internet. We grew up with the internet and shaped it and now we have to limit what we do on it. Everything we put on-line has to be appropriate for everyone from our family to our students to the students’ parents all the way back to our boss. But in my opinion this isn't such a bad thing. We can't complain about privacy when we know that with the internet there is no privacy and we are trying to teach our students this as well. We as teachers cannot be hypocrites and must lead by example. We also need to be knowledgeable about the topic, you can't teach someone to be a good digital citizen when you don't know anything about it and don't strive to be one yourself. 

2. Describe how you will incorporate digital citizenship into your regular classroom instruction and activities? You may want to use your digital poster from activity 6.2 as an example of how you might incorporate this learning object into a lesson?

First thing to do is to get the students knowledgeable about digital citizenship and what it is. From there you can expand the knowledge through examples and explain consequences of bad on-line behaviour. Using the "Unknown Exposure" video would be a great tool; it's a little silly but it gets the message across. Afterwards you can talk to the students about how putting something on-line is like putting it on a bathroom stall or painting it on the side of building except you can’t paint over it or erase it. You could make up a list of how to be a good digital citizen with the class and have it displayed at all times somewhere in the classroom. This gives the students an opportunity to place the responsibility on themselves; they made the list after all.  You can also get the students to use their knowledge; there is no point in teaching digital citizenship if you are never going to have them demonstrate it. By having students use the knowledge it is more likely to become a habit, being a good digital citizen may become something they don't even need to think about, they just do it.

Any time technology is being used remind them of their on-line responsibilities; repetition. Another way to remind students about ethics and responsibility is to have them answer a question about it before they can sign out the laptop or tablet that day. The most important thing is making sure the students have the information and understand it, this is the foundation and you can build on it from there.