Even if you are not using social media at school, your students are using social networking sites like Snapchat and Instagram, downloading music, and playing games online. Learning how to look after one’ digital footprint is an important issue these days and knowing what to share, who to share it with is a vital part of this process. Therefore, it has become inevitable for the schools to teach them how to be safe and responsible online. In order to do this effectively, schools should design a digital citizenship curriculum. There are many resources available according to the needs of each age group online that will help you do this.
Before you start designing your own curriculum, please read this post by George Couros and watch the video. I strongly believe that the message in this inspiring post is very important and our curriculum should be designed to teach our students and the parents what they can accomplish if they are smart and responsible in using the opportunities technology provides us. You can then visit Mark Dribble’s website and read his post on the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship.
IMAGE CREDIT: Sylvia Duckworth @sylviaduckworth
Google, YouTube, and Common Sense Media have prepared their own DC curriculum that you can use while designing yours. Digital Citizenship resources by Edutopia, Edudemic, ISTE, ICT Evangelist, Shelly Terrell, Digital Citizen wiki and Digital ID wiki may also be helpful.
If you follow this link, you can see a free comic book that teaches many things about copyright. The resources in this livebinder may also help you teach copyright to your students. In this link, there is a great guide prepared for K-6 teachers planning to design a digital citizenship curriculum. Here, you can find another great interactive guide which you can explore with your students. If you scroll down the blog post by Global Digital Citizen, you can find digital citizenship agreements that you can download and use with your students. Please make sure that the resources you have curated or designed are age-appropriate and relevant and meet the needs of your learners. You can find examples here and here. Finally, in this blog post, Andrew Miller suggests designing Digital Citizenship PBL projects with students. I’ll try this with my students next year. What about you?
