When I think of digital citizenship, I think of it as the way we conduct ourselves on the internet and what we do to make the internet a safer and better place for everyone. This idea us SORTA similar to how I see regular citizenship though.. Our duty as citizens of a country, nation, school, home, anything, is to do what we're supposed to by following the law, and try to help others so that we can live in a safer world. So what does this actually look like? Well.. people on the internet post some crazy things sometimes.. I have seen pictures of people just casually doing drugs on instagram like it's just no big deal and I sit there thinking to myself, do they not realize that when they want a job one day this stuff is gonna come back up? It's crazy like how do people think that is even remotely okay? Recently we acquired a new coach who made us COMPLETELY clean up our social media accounts.. like to the point if there was even the side of a beer can in the bottom left corner of the picture that NO ONE would even notice, it had to be deleted. I actually really struggled with this because turns out that was the case in most of the best pictures I had taken, OF COURSE 😐 . After deleting around 150 pictures, I realized it was actually for our own good.
Using digital citizenship in the classroom can be a really simple thing to do and really easily done. I find that lots of teachers have decided to leave it to the parents to deal with but really it needs to be done from both the home and school. Since BYOD is gaining ground and becoming way more widespread, we as teachers must monitor our students and make sure that they are staying on task. School computers must have filters and blocks to keep students from websites that will harm them. Parents and teachers must also work together to prevent one of the biggest problems we are having today.. cyberbullying. Everyone wants to feel safe. Children know from a young age stigmas associated with areas and people and places that are considered "unsafe," when we can teach children that there are areas on the internet and people that have bad intentions just like in the real world, then maybe our children will be more cautious. Newton Conover City Schools reported that 30% of teens have made plans with a stranger on the internet to meet up! THAT IS A HORRIFYING AMOUNT. We have to teach our children without scaring them that there are people out there who want to hurt them whether that is physically or emotionally, we have to protect our children by teaching them safe internet use.
