Digital citizenship may be one of the most important aspects of a child’s education nowadays. When I started this course five weeks ago, I may have slightly believed that statement, but not to the extent that I do now. So what does digital citizenship mean to you? My mantra is…Respect is the Golden Rule within our digital lives. Notice that my mantra focuses on one word that many of our students do not fully grasp in their lives. If they struggle with it then we can not expect them to master it in the digital world as well.
We are only one piece to the puzzle though in the big picture. I believe that the communication and collaboration between teachers, parents and community members are the keys to bringing our children into the 21st century the right way. One way of doing that includes providing resources to families and teachers to use with students to help build their knowledge of digital citizenship. Check out a collection of digital citizenship resources that I have collected here.
While I have enjoyed the content of this course; the sheer magnitude of the course material made it very hard to apply any of the information that I have learned so far. I will be coming back to this content a lot in the future, in order to use it for the students in my district. I believe that my position in my district will allow me to use a lot of this information to help the teachers and students become better digital citizens. I plan to create an effective and focused digital citizenship curriculum to make sure our students are prepared for their future after they are done with school.
This video helps explain the elements of digital citizenship and what I believe is the most important element.
During this course, I would consider my mantra to be my biggest accomplishment, because I believe that that short phrase could have more impact on students than a lot of the other information. Learning about the nine elements will be the biggest takeaway from this course and that information will be applied in my position as a technology coach more than anything else. The two books from this course will be the most important resource that I use going forward with my new digital citizenship curriculum.
Exploring the materials in this course has been a big endeavor, but I believe that the resources that I have curated in my Wakelet collection will be a great tool for the teachers, parents, and students in my district. I plan to continue to grow this collection in order to use it as an official resource in my district. If I had to share with my colleagues about this course, I would probably point them toward the book, “Bullying beyond the schoolyard” by Hinduja and Patchin (2015), so they can start to prepare and help our students with this growing epidemic. It will be resources such as this book that will begin the transformation of our students and their citizenship online.
References
Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2015). Bullying beyond the schoolyard: Preventing and responding to cyberbullying. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: Nine elements all students should know. (3rd ed.). Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology.
Mischnick Mindset 