Despite graduating in 2021, my school did touch the subject of cyber safety or digital citizenship. Until this class, I had never even heard of digital citizenship. I grew up in a very rural town where around half of the students lived on farms. Our school had many fire safety days, drunk driving awareness days, and farm safety days. They went ALL OUT for these awareness days, so it is really shocking to me that for a school that would put all this effort into different types of awareness, they did not once touch cyber safety.
To say this was unhelpful would be the understatement of the year. My generation was one of the first to have totally unmonitored, and unrestricted access to the internet from a very young age mostly because our parents had no idea how any of it worked or the possibilities. This led to my peers and I getting into many dangerous situations online with no idea of where to go or who to turn to for help.
Younger and younger kids are gaining unrestricted access to an infinitely evolving digital world and as the Digital Citizenship Continuum from Kindergarten to Grade 12 says, digital citizenship education needs to start as young as Kindergarten. As more and more kids have unmonitored access to a digital social world via video games such as Fortnite and Roblox, it is important that they know they are talking to REAL people, and that real people do not always tell the truth about who they are, as explained in the PDF.
The reality is, we can’t control what the children of others do on the internet. As teachers, I feel that what we CAN do is educate our students and even their parents to the best of our abilities on digital citizenship. One thing that I think could be really helpful is simply trying to keep parents in the loop and giving them the resources so they could have these kinds of talks with their children outside of school as well. For example, we know Snapchat is a dangerous app targeted towards children, as a seemingly “untraceable” social space where their parents cannot monitor them. Sending out an email that includes sources explaining the dangers of these apps and games, can allow parents to see for themselves and encourage them to have these talks with their kids outside of school. The more awareness in general, the better. Here is a resource that could be used to explain the dangers of Snapchat to parents. CommonSense Media has many articles for parents to be able to understand more about the games and platforms their children are using.
I think the assumption that because kids use technology at very young ages, they know how to use it safely is incorrect. Children do not understand the risks and dangers of a digital social world from playing Minecraft or watching YouTube videos on an iPad. So the transition from single-player, offline games to an unregulated online, multiplayer game is very dangerous if they are not taught about digital citizenship first. One thing that has really started to concern me is the desensitisation of the real world due to video games in children. Seeing the way young kids imitate youtube and twitch gamers they see online both in person and online is really scary as it is often aggressive, hurtful, or discriminatory. The assumed security of anonymity or unaccountability of their words and actions in the digital world is something that I feel is really harmful for the social development of children and teens.
That is why I think teaching the “Responsible Use Policy” in the Saskatchewan Digital Citizenship Guide is the way to go when teaching digital citizenship. I think this coincides with the increasingly popular authoritative parenting strategies that demonstrate and reward ideal and positive behaviours while explaining the dangers or consequences of unideal or unsafe behaviours, rather than only stating what shouldn’t be done. I think if we can show students how to be responsible online, rather than just saying what not to do, the outcomes will be better. I think kids often learn better by “doing” so actually having the kids engage in responsible digital use in the classroom is a great way to demonstrate ideal and positive behaviours.
I hope to teach high school health, as it is my major, and digital citizenship is going to be a really important theme in my classroom. I have been inspired by this class to incorporate some sort of blogging-style assignment in my classroom. I think this could be done as an exit-slip, a final unit project, or a continuous prompted journal assignment. In my future classroom, I will spend as much time as I possibly can on digital citizenship. I don’t think I would be able to spend more than two weeks on it unfortunately, but for those two weeks I would focus heavily on 3 of Ribble’s Nine elements of Digital Citizenship- Digital Law, Digital Rights and Responsibilities, and Digital Safety and Security. I would create an assignment where students respond via blog to journal prompts allowing them to use class discussions, resources, videos, and their own experiences to demonstrate their opinion, understanding, and evidence of their own responsible digital use. I’m sure this assignment idea will evolve and I’ll have a better idea of how to actually teach these topics as I complete more of my health curriculum classes, but that is essentially a rough idea of how I would like to teach digital citizenship in my future classroom.
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