Digital Citizenship Week 1 Reflection
In the world that we live in digital media is readily available in the world today. According to Marialice Curran research (2012) 95% of students 12-17 are online and 80% are on social media. With this staggering figure are your students ready to venture out into the world wide web. This is a question that I had to ask myself. As I began to look further into this week’s materials, I found myself doubting that I was doing enough for my students.
This became a major wake-up call for me. If I am not doing enough for my students, I highly doubt that my colleagues are doing it either. This is something that will need to be addressed with my building principal and TLC group. We need to incorporate this into our Social Emotional Learning (SEL). I feel as though digital citizenship can go hand in hand with SEL. As we are talking and demonstrating SEL in classroom. We need to incorporate digital citizenship as well.
So what is Digital Citizenship anyways? If you were to do a search for Digital Citizenship you would find that there are several definitions. Here are some of the leading definitions.
- Zook’s Digital Definition: Digital citizenship refers to the responsible use of technology by anyone who uses computers, the internet and digital devices to engage with society on any level.
- Ribble’s Digital Definition: Digital citizenship is the continuously developing norms of appropriate, responsible, and empowered technology use.
- Heick’s Digital Definition: The quality of habits, actions, and consumption patterns that impact the ecology of digital content and communities.
After looking through a number of definitions I worked to create my own definition. “Digital Citizenship is creating healthy digital habits and traits that allow members of society to work collaboratively in the digital world.”
Leigh Jass
As a social studies teacher, I have taught government and one of my biggest goals is to always create informed well rounded citizens. As part of that teachers should also help to create world citizens. Looking through the research of Mike Ribble, he has created nine elements that he believes is needed in order to create a well rounded digital citizen. He has also broken this down in to a S3 framework of Savvy, Social, and Safety. By combining these nine elements he has made the connections to how these are all interconnecting. It is hard to develop one element with out working on the others. In Curran’s research she took digital citizenship to a whole new level. By creating a world wide collaboration piece she was able to create a model for administrators, teachers, and students to follow.
As educators we should do more than just talk about cyberbullying, plagiarism, and good online etiquette. We need to do more to create digital citizens that will be able to contribute in the world in a positive way. I think that we can all look at the current issues surrounding the united states (2020) and say that is something we can all use a little more of. In order for there to be change one must first change the way that we teach it.
Resources
Curran, M. B., Phd. (2012). ICitizen: Are You a Socially Responsible Digital Citizen? Retrieved from https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.amazonaws.com/5c082f78d4ba4/2609158?response-cache-control=private, max-age=21600&response-content-disposition=inline; filename*=UTF-8”icitizen_paper_M_Curran.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200823T120000Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PL5SJBSTP6/20200823/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=c9a32b129ec73da578d289bb70f8a7f0ce9e006476352f1f80fba27fb8b6431b
Heick, T. (2018, December 17). Definition Of Digital Citizenship. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/the-definition-of-digital-citzenship/
Ribble, M. (2017). Nine Elements. Retrieved from https://www.digitalcitizenship.net/nine-elements.html
Zook, C. (2019). What Is Digital Citizenship & How Do You Teach It? Retrieved from https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/what-is-digital-citizenship
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