As a site leader with students TK – 5, I have been thinking about the work we’ve done already with digital citizenship and what more we can do given our new reality in distance learning. We are also a communication and media magnet school, so we’ve done some work in the area of public speaking and interpersonal communication. As a school we’ve created some expectations and agreements about how to present information to an audience. Teachers have used games and prompts to help students feel more comfortable and prepared to speak publicly. They’ve also practiced things like eye contact, voice, volume, etc. I’m thinking that we might take a similar approach to communicating to audiences on Zoom or other platforms, by adapting some of our communication skills to being on screen. Just as there are protocols for presenting in person in how to hold your audience’s attention, this could be a new challenge for creating protocols for what’s appropriate and engaging to an online listener or viewer.
In order to make digital citizenship learning more personal, I might take pieces of a prepared lesson from a site like Common Sense Media and then take a more collaborative approach for students. For instance, I did this with my lesson on Sharing Safely and included more opportunities for students to share their own experiences to make it more engaging and relevant for students. We have plenty of real-life examples at our school of students “over-sharing” which has led to hurt feelings, gossip, etc. The more we give students space to apply the content to real problems they face, the more likely it will be to change behaviors.
Another great way to make the learning more personal would be to have the students to explore some of the games, activities, lessons etc. and then present to another group or the class. I’m thinking for 4th and 5th graders or even 3rd grade, student partners or groups could be assigned a topic: cyberbullying, passwords, age-appropriate content, etc. and then they could explore a site like Be Internet Awesome, just like we did. The students could design a journey for students to take through the website or they could create their own activities to help teach the concepts.
I noticed that all the resources we explored recommended that students take a pledge or make a commitment to practice good digital citizenship. As a school, each classroom makes agreements as part of their social emotional learning to create a safe place for all the kids to share and feel supported by their peers. I think a way to make the digital citizenship learning more personal would be to have each class develop their own set of standards or agreements. Using an online thinking routine, where students could brainstorm ideas would give each student the opportunity to contribute their ideas. Again, if the students have a voice in helping to create the pledge, I believe it will have greater meaning for them and hopefully prevent some of the negative consequences we see too often in our schools.