Digital Citizenship

January 2019

As we slowly roll out the ISTE Standards for Educators and ISTE Standards for Students, the one overarching standard that can easily be embedded into our routines is Digital Citizenship.

The ISTE Standards for Educators states that "Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world." What does this mean? It means that we as teachers need to start modelling and providing our students with experiences that teach them how to navigate and contribute to the digital world confidently, positively, and safely.

Digital Citizenship as a stand alone lesson is not always necessary. Embedding it into your lessons through a two minute conversation or into your content lessons can save you time and give you a bigger bang for your buck.

For example, students in first and second grade classrooms have started to use SeeSaw Learning Journal to publish their digital work. After posting, peers then critique each other's work based on the outcomes of the lesson. Accountable talk stems (conversation starters) were used to help guide their conversations in respectual and constructive ways.

First grade students published a Book Creator project into SeeSaw, identifying important information in non-fiction text. Their peers then used accountable talk stems to record a star and a step (a goal) based on their criteria checklist.

Second grade students read a story and then recorded themselves speaking from the perspective of two different characters in ChatterPix Kids. After uploading their videos to SeeSaw, peers critiqued each other's work (in SeeSaw) based on fluency criteria from Lucy Calkin's Units of Study . Based on the feedback, students then created a fluency goal for themselves (Danielson Domain 3d).

The above examples show students how digital technology can be used to drive their own learning (ISTE Standards for Students: Empowered Learner), but they are also beginning to learn how technology can be used in positive and constructive ways.

When thinking about digital citizenship, we also want to teach students to be mindful of intellectual rights and propery (literay works, images, and music) when they want to use matieral from the internet. Mind you, "using it for educational purposes," is not as wide and general as you may think, so it is important to start the learning and modelling when they are young.

To help students in K-4 get started with this understanding, we have provided four sites in Clever that allows students to use images royalty free in their projects. Guiding students towards these sites is an important first step towards learning about copyright laws.

To further assist you, below are resources available for every K-4 classroom to help your students be digital citizens.

Remember, you don't always have to teach digital citizenship, you can embed it!

Resources:

Common Sense Media: Free digital citizenship lessons and resources for every grade level.

ISTE.org: 9 Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship Poster: Hang this up in your room to refer to!