When first faced with the prospect of writing about digital citizenship, I have to admit that I floundered. I struggled to understand the difference between this topic and digital literacy. It didn’t help that many of the scholarly authors (Armfield 2019, Hui & Campbell 2018, Crichton, Pegler, & White 2012) failed to actually define digital citizenship before diving into the topic. When I finally did find definitions, they were somewhat different. For example, Chris Zook (2019) asserts that “Digital citizenship refers to the responsible use of technology by anyone who uses computers, the Internet, and digital devices to engage with society on any level,” and Richard Culatta (2018) defines digital citizenship as “using technology to make your community better, to respectfully engage with people who have different beliefs from yours, to be able to shape and change public policy, and to be able to recognize the validity of online sources of information.” While these definitions are quite different, they both seem to have the same concepts at their heart, that of being a good citizen online.
This may seem like common sense, but digital citizenship is important to learn and practice. The correlation between online bullying and physically, mentally, and emotionally violent attacks (Yang 2013) alone shows that this is a prevalent issue that needs addressing. Since online activity can not be supervised in the same manner as offline activity, many people will test what they can get away with. Behaviors that are unacceptable in person may go unnoticed, especially for children and teenagers whose parents are digitally illiterate. Therefore, it is not enough to teach and require acceptable behaviors in the classroom, and teachers must venture into the online realm as well.
Perhaps one of the best places to start teaching digital citizenship is with cyber bullying. This is because almost every student has or will experience some form of bullying, and this is a place where empathy can be accessed. By making it personal, students will care about their own behavior more and understand how their actions can affect others. From cyber bullying, a teacher could branch out into other aspects of digital citizenship, including how the internet works and uses personal information, practicing digital literacy, privacy, security, addressing digital inequalities, and online wellness (Zook 2019). These important parts of digital citizenship could be taught through a class blog or website that the students take turns documenting important class moments within. Google Classroom is a tool that I have used before and will use in the future to achieve this goal. It is important to discuss appropriate vs. inappropriate behavior, topics, and posts with a class before granting access. This platform is particularly for practicing online discussion in that students can access it whenever they have a device, like most other platforms they might be using, but the teacher can screen and decide whether to approve posts. This gives the teacher control while allowing students to try out digital citizenship in a real situation.
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