This summer I attended a great session in San Antonio with Julie Paddock (@jpaddock-tech) and Nancy Watson (@nancywtech), co-chairs of ISTE’s Digital Citizenship PLN (@DigCitPLN). They were great presenters and models, both for engaging presentation skills and promoting digital citizenship. I learned some new great ideas from Julie, Nancy, and the other participants, but one message resonated clearly: “Digital Citizenship is…the way you need to teach, ALL the time.”
I hadn’t previously considered the implications of their message, but it makes a lot of sense. Too many of the districts I work with take the approach of tackling digital citizenship through a one-day workshop or a citizenship lesson or two at the beginning of the year. Despite the best of intentions, this can cause digital citizenship to become an add-on, or worse, forgettable as the school year goes on. My goal was to take up the banner and try to encourage educators in some of my districts to model digital citizenship every lesson, every day.
ModelING Digital Citizenship: It’s Your Choice
Later in the summer I was presenting at one of those summer kick-off workshops that is typical of the approach Julie and Nancy were encouraging us to move beyond. It is what it is, however, and districts have to work within constraints, so I decided to try to move towards a more encompassing approach to digital citizenship within the limits of a three-hour workshop. What to do? Give them choice!
Taking a nod from many of my elementary colleagues, I created this choice board to help my teachers Be a Model Digital Citizen. The focus is providing educators the opportunity to explore the various facets of digital citizenship so they can “model positive digital citizenship every class, every day.” The categories are my interpretation of key components of the Digital Citizen standard from the new ISTE Standards for Students. Because we are ALL digital citizens, whether we want to be or not, the first level of the board is Citizen, and I encourage you to at least progress to the level of Model. You can challenge yourself to earn points to move up levels, if you prefer, because you may already have higher goals.
Full directions for options for using the choice board are at the beginning of the document. The idea is that educators—and it truly was educators as I had many counselors attend my sessions—can enter the digital citizenship discussion at their own level of comfort and expertise. Some may need further information about a key area of digital citizenship, while others are ready to move towards a more collaborative approach both within and beyond one’s school. The skills build in intensity from short individual tasks to collaborative ones that can take a significant amount of time to complete. You decide your goal and the actions you plan to take. Each activity links to a range of resources to get you started on modeling new citizenship skills every day.
Please feel free to use and share the choice board, and please let me know how you used it and how it worked out. I’m open to suggestion for improving it. I need to send out thanks to my colleague Dr. Kendall Latham, who reviewed and improved the board as it was being developed. I also want to thank Alice Keeler for her Digital Citizenship Badge Collector that several of my teachers really enjoyed using to track their progress.
Digital Citizenship Choice Board