Digital Citizenship: Every Student, Every Day
Imagine on a Friday night, handing your 15-year-old son your car keys with no Driver’s Safety classes, no previous practice with you or any other family member and no Driver’s Permit. Does that scenario sound as ridiculous to you as it does to me?
Well, sadly, this is happening far too often in our nation’s schools when it comes to technology. We are handing our students the car keys to the internet with little to no prior teaching. We are assuming our students are coming to us as technology experts, but the notion of “digital natives” has been thoroughly debunked. We cannot assume our students know how to safely, appropriately and effectively navigate the internet.
Additionally, teaching digital citizenship is often considered the responsibility of the Technology teacher in our school buildings. I believe that is a major injustice to our students for several reasons. For one, some schools don’t have a dedicated technology teacher. (That is a far greater injustice in my opinion, but I’ll save that rant for another blog post.) Who fills the void of responsibility at those schools lacking a dedicated tech teacher? The answer typically is no one. Furthermore, technology taught as a Special means students only see their technology teacher about once a week. Often digital citizenship is taught as a unit which means it’s only focused on a few weeks out of the school year. Our kids are using the internet every day; multiple times a day; in and out of school. Examing the imbalance of the time students spend learning digital citizenship versus their daily time using the internet further underscores my point.
Since I can’t accurately quantify the average time spent teaching digital citizenship in the United States, I’m going to reflect on my own time in the tech lab. When I was a technology teacher I dedicated about eight weeks to explicitly teaching digital citizenship. Explicitly teaching, in my opinion, means that each week’s lesson objective was associated with digital citizenship. Implicitly teaching, in my opinion, is when the lesson objective wasn’t necessarily tied to digital citizenship, but the topic presented itself. For example, while teaching students how to create their own digital portfolios, I made sure to tie it back into our learning around digital identity and digital footprints. Since I can’t accurately quantify the time I spent implicitly teaching digital citizenship, I’m going to ignore it for the moment. So eight weeks of teaching equals roughly eight hours of lessons for each of my students. Therefore, my students received roughly eight hours of instruction on digital citizenship over the course of a school year.
According to “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight 2017” children ages five to eight spend an average of two hours and 56 minutes in front of a screen every day.
Of the roughly three hours of daily screen time for our five to eight-year-olds; almost half is spent on a mobile device or computer!
For every hour my students spent learning digital citizenship they spent nearly 137 hours online!
That statistic illustrates the desperate disparity between our children’s understanding of using technology safely and appropriately and the amount of time they actually spend using it. Something has to change, and I have a solution.
Now, teachers have enough on their plates already. I’m not advocating for them to take on anything new or different. However, topics of digital citizenship are already embedded in everything we do. Do our students engage in research projects? Do they work collaboratively both on and offline? Do we ask them to cite their sources? The answer is yes; thus, it’s not asking too much of teachers to reinforce digital citizenship as their students engage in these types of tasks daily. The bulk of the lifting can and should remain with the technology teacher, however, it needs to be reinforced each and everytime our students begin working online.
Digital Citizenship every student, every day is a reality that I advocate for in all our schools. Who’s with me?
