Digital Citizenship week: October 14-18

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by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Academic Specialist

Did you know that October 14th through the 18th is Digital Citizenship week? While it can be difficult to find time to add more content to your already packed curriculum, in today's digital age, it's essential for students to understand and practice responsible online behavior. Teaching digital citizenship in K-12 schools prepares students for the challenges and opportunities of the digital world including the permanence of your digital footprint, and critical thinking to evaluate the quality and accuracy of online information.

If you can find some time during indoor recess, after school clubs, advisory period, or other flex-time, here are some ideas for what to do with students to boost their digital citizenship knowledge:


Adobe Express

Adobe Express contains multiple templates for students to create a Digital Citizenship pledge or to share what they know. Templates include posters, infographics and web pages. One engaging idea would be to combine the Animate Audio tool with one of these background templates. With Animate Audio, students can choose an avatar, record their voice and then add that to their preferred template to include mixed media in their message about Digital Citizenship. See an example here.


Discovery Education 

Discovery Education has 2 Digital Citizenship channels complete with videos and video series, modules, and student activities. Many of these can be accessed by students on their own or shared by the teacher. They also have over 50 lessons and activities that teachers can assign to students including a board dedicated to Spotlight on Strategies that teachers can use to engage students with the content. One of these strategies is Instagramming which mimics a popular social media site to help students focus on imagery and prompt summarization through short comments and hashtags. (Make sure your click into DE from Classlink before you select the activity linked above.)


Nearpod

Nearpod partnered with Common Sense years ago to design interactive lessons to accompany each lesson in the Common Sense Digital Citizenship Catalog. Like other Nearpod lessons, these can be found by selecting the grade level(s) and then searching for relevant keywords. Elementary topics include “Screen out the Mean” to help students turn off social media when it gets unhealthy, and “Traveling Safely Online” a bundle of lesson to learn about safe searching and analyzing resources. Middle school topics include “Cyberbullying and Upstanding” to help students recognize bullying online and how to safely get involved rather than ignoring it, and “What’s Your Digital Footprint” to make students aware of the lifespan of their posts and the importance of thinking before sharing. High school topics include “My Online Code” to help students understand the ethical responsibilities they have in the online world, and “Who Are You on Social Media?” to help students avoid the pitfall of online anonymity that makes people act badly sometimes. (Make sure your click into Nearpod from Classlink before you select the activities linked above.)


Common Sense

Speaking of commonsense.org, it isn’t just through Nearpod that we can access this valuable resource! They have a whole map of lessons for primary and secondary ES, MS and HS students to cover Digital Citizenship week. One trending and timely lesson is “Take a Stand on Cellphone Bans” which attempts to engage students in the conversation to think critically about WHY educators want to remove cellphones from the classroom and encourages students to hone and voice their own arguments for or against bans.


WeVideo 

The Assignment Ideas area is a perfect place to… get assignment ideas. There are two for letting students share their understanding of digital citizenship. In the first, the students pick a Digital Citizenship topic and create a video PSA to inform their peers about the topic. The second allows students to become their own comic book superhero whose message is good digital citizenship practice. These projects also align to Common Sense resources and lessons. (Make sure your click into WeVideo from Classlink before you select the Assignment Ideas linked above.)


Wixie

What can’t Wixie do? If you’re struggling to answer that, don’t worry, it definitely isn’t “support digital citizenship!” They have templates and entire lessons on this topic too. Teachers and students can find templates explaining how they practice digital citizenship or to make a pledge to be a better digital citizen. But if you need more guidance, the Curriculum Activities include ideas, a choice board and even an entire digital citizenship curriculum that you can pick and choose lessons and templates from. Students can combine images, text and audio recordings to make an engaging project to share with their teacher and classmates about practicing good digital citizenship. (Make sure your click into Wixie from Classlink before you select the curriculum linked above.)

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