Digital Citizenship in Action

Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities

Kristen Mattson

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781564846440
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Standards

Discover ways to help students develop relationships based on mutual trust and understanding in digital spaces and become active, participatory citizens in these spaces. For years, much of the available curricula for teaching digital citizenship focused on "don'ts." Don't share addresses or phone numbers. Don't give out passwords. Don't bully other students. The conversation then shifted, with digital citizenship curriculum moving toward teaching students how to positively brand themselves so that they would stand out for future scholarships and job opportunities.In the end, both messages failed to address one of the most important aspects of citizenship: being in community with others. As citizens, we have a responsibility to give back to the community and to work toward social justice and equity. Digital citizenship curricula should strive to show students possibilities over problems, opportunities over risks and community successes over personal gain. Digital Citizenship in Action aims to do just that.This book includes:

• Tips for creating a digital space where students can try something new, grow through mistakes, and learn what it means to be a citizen in different spaces.
• "Spotlight Stories" from teachers engaged with participatory digital citizenship that demonstrate how these ideas play out in actual classrooms.
• Featured activities to help you integrate these ideas into your classroom.

In this book, you'll find practical ways to take digital citizenship beyond a conversation about personal responsibility so that you can create opportunities for students to become participatory citizens in online spaces. Audience: 6-12 educators, curriculum directors and library media specialists

1

Creating Space for Digital Citizenship

Imagine this. You enter your child’s middle school to volunteer for a few hours in the library. Walking down the halls, you encounter a poster encouraging students to THINK before they post on social media (Shannon, 2014). You smile to yourself knowing that your own 11-year-old is not using most of these apps or websites due to the 13 and up age restrictions to create an account. You also feel relief knowing that most of the social media sites on the poster are blocked at your child’s school (Figure 1.1).

You walk a few more feet down the hall, passing an open classroom door. Students are sitting quietly at their desks, which are arranged in straight rows, facing the front of the room. They furiously scribble information into their notebooks as the teacher recites important facts and gestures toward bullet points on the PowerPoint slide behind him.

Figure 1.1 This popular poster encourages students to consider what they say on social media before they press the Post button.

Wow, you think to yourself. This teacher has everything under control. That’s just the way I remember school! Before moving on, another poster catches your eye. This one is hanging just outside of the classroom door—visible to all who enter. It reminds students to put away their devices before coming into the room (Figure 1.2).

You feel your phone buzz in your pocket, reminding you of your scheduled volunteer time, and hustle away to the library, feeling confident that your child’s teachers have this whole technology thing under control.

Figure 1.2 The message this poster sends is that technology is a distraction from learning and does not belong in the classroom.

Current Approaches to Digital Citizenship

If you are a teacher or administrator, you may have posters like those in Figures 1.1 and 1.2 hanging in your school or classroom. You may have also participated in “Digital Citizenship Week,” taught lessons about cyberbullying during an advisory period, or attended an assembly where your school resource officer spoke about the legal ramifications of online harassment, sexting, or sharing images of illegal behaviors.

Oftentimes, digital citizenship education is relegated to isolated lessons, events, posters, or messages presented to students outside of the context of their typical, daily learning experiences. Ironically, these messages of online safety are delivered in the same classrooms that may have a “no device” poster hanging on the door. In fact, as Mattson (2016) has pointed out, many free, readily available digital citizenship lessons found online can be completed without students even touching a device.

How can we ensure that we are teaching all aspects of citizenship, digital citizenship included, through life experiences and not solely through lecture?

Because these lessons, parent nights, posters, and slogans deliver messages outside of authentic digital contexts, they’re often relegated to a list of rules and guidelines for students to follow when they do enter a digital space. I’ve come to think of these rules as the personal responsibilities of digital citizens. While online, we all have a responsibility to be respectful to ourselves and others, to follow acceptable use policies, and to make healthy decisions, in the same ways that we must follow laws and respect others in our physical communities.

The difference between the traditional citizenship education our students receive and the digital citizenship lessons they are given is often a difference in contexts—experiential learning as opposed to more abstract, classroom-based techniques. When children are young, for example, they learn about safe ways to cross the street as they walk to school. They learn about sharing, disagreement, and compromise as they argue over toys in their preschool classroom or negotiate the ways to work on a group assignment in the fifth grade.

Our middle school students experience what it means to be a contributing citizen of a school community when they decorate their hallways for a big game, serve as student council volunteers, and navigate their way through changing friendships and social dynamics. By high school, our students are choosing communities of their own as they find clubs, sports, activities, and even places of part-time employment to join, learn from, and contribute to.

Through all of these experiences—whether it’s learning that cutting in line is socially unacceptable or it’s figuring out how to live in a community of people from a variety of backgrounds and with life experiences different from theirs—students are by and large learning aspects of citizenship, civil life, and community engagement under the tutelage and guidance of adult mentors in the form of parents, religious leaders, coaches, and teachers.

And yet, in online spaces, we have come to accept a mentorship gap between children and adults. As noted by James (2014), we feel an obligation to tell our students the “rules of the road,” but policy, fear, expectations, or curricular priorities keep us from jumping in the passenger seat and guiding our students as they navigate new digital terrain.

So how can we close this mentorship gap? How can we ensure that we are teaching all aspects of citizenship, digital citizenship included, through life experiences and not solely through lecture? As educators, part of our responsibility is to create time and space for this type of learning to occur.

Participatory Citizenship Approach

I was at a fairly large educational technology conference earlier this year and sat in a session that required participants to share an edtech success story with other people at our table. When it was my turn, I told the group about a community bulletin board website called Padlet that I enjoy using with students. The tool had enabled my high schoolers to organize their learning collaboratively and through the use of multimedia. Instead of relying on a static notebook filled with information they wrote down, students now had a dynamic, collaborative space for keeping track of information. As the class learned new content, students were able to rearrange information on their digital boards, allowing them to make connections to previous learning and create space for new ideas to come.

The man to my right, however, had not had such a fabulous experience using Padlet in his own high school classroom. He had given it a try, but quickly gave up because the teens could not refrain from posting inappropriate content to the boards. The teacher declared that he would no longer be offering his class opportunities to use this digital tool because students simply could not handle the responsibility of collaborative, online curation and discussion.

So why did one tool work so fabulously with my students while it was a total flop for another group of kids the same age? One possible reason could be attributed to the work I had done with my students earlier in the year. Before even introducing the technology to the class, I modeled the types of posts I wanted to see and demonstrated how this process of community note-taking would be different from the individual note-taking students were used to. During our units, I was also continuously monitoring, mentoring, and providing feedback and redirection as students contributed to the community bulletin boards. After I shared this experience at the conference session, the teacher agreed he could have done a lot more to teach, model, and hold students accountable for the type of interactions he was hoping for.

You see, it’s simply not enough to give students a technology tool and ask them to use it while silently hoping for the best. In order for your students to become participatory digital citizens, they are going to need some space to practice under your mentorship. This space does not have to be the most popular social media platform that all the “cool kids” are using. It’s perfectly acceptable to help students learn about digital communities in spaces designed for education, such as Google Classroom, Edmodo, Canvas, and a variety of other educational technology tools like the Padlet boards I used with my students.

In order for your students to become participatory digital citizens, they are going to need some space to practice under your mentorship.

Creating a digital space is a start, and maybe you already have an online presence for your class. There are unique aspects, however, that can differentiate a classroom website from a true digital learning community. Classroom websites are often places for one-way communication from teachers to students and parents. On such class websites, the teacher is the only person posting content. A digital learning community, on the other hand, is a space where many voices are invited to contribute, collaborate with one another, and think critically together.

Allowing your students to collaborate with one another in digital communities can be a little scary at first, but remember that when you take this leap in your classroom, you are providing students with an awesome opportunity to participate as digital citizens in spaces that are authentic, purposeful, and guided. The digital space you create will be a safe place for students to try something new, make mistakes they can grow from, and experience successes they can be proud of—all while learning what it takes to be a citizen of many different types of spaces. These digital communities, when designed and executed with these goals in mind, can mimic the types of online spaces that students will share with friends, relatives, and eventually, the world!

If you are ready to set up a digital learning community for your students, here are some excellent first steps.

A digital learning community… is a space where many voices are invited to contribute, collaborate with one another, and think critically together.

Investigate

Talk with your colleagues, the school librarian, and your building administrators about digital tools that you may already have access to through building or district subscriptions. You must also consider the age of your students. If they are under 13, any digital tool you use with them may require parental consent to set up accounts. Again, your school librarian or administrator that handles digital subscriptions should be able to help you with any legalities, permissions forms, and account setups.

Communicate

Talk to your students and their parents. What would they like to use a digital learning community for? What other digital spaces do they already belong to? What skills would they like to practice? Besides one another, is there a larger audience your students would like to connect with? Use the answers to these questions to help you choose a digital platform and develop a space that will meet your class’s needs as well as your own curricular goals.

Build a Support Network

Find a “partner in crime” who will support you in your attempt to try something new. Is there another teacher on your team who wants to try this with you? If not, is there a teacher in another building who is already doing some great work with digital communities and might serve as your mentor? Do you have a tech-savvy neighbor, parent, or friend that you could bounce ideas around with? Identifying a person or two who can cheer you on when you hit a bump in the road is vital to your professional growth—as it is to anyone’s! It’s also important to make sure to communicat...