What is your digital footprint? A Lesson on Digital Citizenship

My intent this year is to encourage and provide opportunities for my students to contribute more and consume less (an idea they are not very familiar with).  My proposed method for doing this was through blogging.  Part of my new teacher induction is going through literacy training and providing evidence for how I promote literacy in my content area.  I saw this as an opportunity for me to teach students how to be blog authors.  It would both provide pieces for my training purposes, as well as would provide them with printed writing pieces for their writing portfolio (required for graduation).

I was a bit shaky on the idea at first, because you're opening them up to a lot at once, so I saw this as an opportunity for me to have them explore the idea of what it means to be a digital citizen.  I started the lesson off with a short 2 minute video titled:  Sizing Your Digital Footprint.

I then asked students to brainstorm and write down the answers to these questions on their own:

 A. What is digital citizenship?
B. What does it mean to be a good digital citizen?  What are characteristics of good digital citizenship?

 Once students had ideas down on their paper, we did a think-pair-share exercise where students were asked to come to a consensus and final definition on a note card that they would turn in to share, with both of their names on it.  I went through and read student’s responses to the class.  I was amazed at how many misconceptions there were on what digital citizenship meant.  Here are some of my favorites:

"citizen that uses digital devices"
"uses electronics, involved with technology"
"A good digital citizen is always using their device."
"use your technology wisely and not using it constantly...not getting a new cell phone every time one comes out...not text someone in every class, just use it for things you need it for like school work and not be on video games 24-7."
"searching good searches, no bad websites, using electronics LESS if you can."
"digifully involved with good intentions"
"You can be a good digital citizen by doing projects for the community by like Facebook or another social network."

Tomorrow we are going to continue with a discussion of these ideas and students will be introduced to the nine elements of digital citizenship by Mark Ribble.  I was surprised at the amount of buy in from my students on this topic.  We were not asked once, why are we doing this? or is this formative or benchmark?  A very valuable formative lesson!

Go to....Blog Post:  Digital Citizenship Lesson Part 2

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