Step 10

The three things that I want my students to understand about digital citizenship are; respect and inquiry. As the internet becomes more and more available students are finding themselves bombarded with decisions that affect them and others. Cyber-bullying has become more and more an important topic that needs to be discussed in classrooms and homes. Respect for oneself and others is the foundation for preventing cyber-bullying and prevention begins with education. Respect has to be modeled and taught to our students. Respect is also at the base of teaching students that the internet can be used to spread good in the world. Inquiry to me is one of the most important aspects of internet education. Students have to learn that the first thing that comes their way when searching for a topic isn't always the best information. Teachers have to cultivate a culture of inquiry in the classroom to motivate students to question everything. There is so much information available on the internet that every single piece of information has to be questioned. As much as respect has to be taught to prevent cyber-bullying, inquiry has to be taught to promote life long learning.
To introduce digital citizenship I plan on using brain pop. I also want to have open discussions where we question and debate what constitutes respectful behavior on the internet. From our discussions I want our class to create digital word walls that contain key words that come up in our discussion. From there we will use a word cloud generator to display the digital word walls we create.
I plan to share the idea of digital citizenship with parents by sharing with them the resources their children, our students, create. I will then encourage our students to explain their work and talk about the discussions we had that inspired our word walls.