Cyber-bullying and Digital Citizenship, Privacy and Safety

Let’s empower our students to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions online.

We at KIS in collaboration with ICT department and our Libraries will celebrate KIS Digital Citizenship Week October 16-20, 2017. The celebration is part of an ongoing effort to teach students how to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world.  Internet safety? Creative copyright? Fake news? With so many topics on our “to teach” list that goes above and beyond the core curriculum, it’s essential to have a game plan.

A provocation from #whatischool twitter chat keeps us relevant and vigilant, what is our game plan?

Cyberbullying, Privacy and Safety, are just some of the digital dilemmas challenging the world’s schools. At the same time, technology continues to expand and enhance the ways students can learn, connect, create, and collaborate. How do we help instill a sense of global citizenship, of civic-mindedness, and respect on the internet? What are some of the best strategies you have seen in practice in your school communities?

QUESTIONS

These are the questions we all need to have answers and a common language to be able to facilitate digital citizenship forward at KIS.

1. What does digital citizenship look like in a school?
2. How do we effectively teach digital citizenship in a sustainable fashion?
3. What are the BIG issues in schools in regards to digital citizenship?
4. What does your ‘digital citizenship curriculum’ look like?
5. What strategies are used to engage the whole school community in digital citizenship best practice?
6. What is the difference between digital citizenship and global citizenship?

Answers

These are my understandings of the matter and yours should be different, I do however state that these answers are the bare minimum, a starting point if you wish, towards something that we will build together.

Digital Citizenship is the new citizenship, we keep the digital in it mainly to highlight it to us older people. There it should be always present in everything we do.

9 Elements of Digital Citizenship

At school, we need to address a wide array of topics to cover all aspects of digital citizenship. How are we able to do it in a sustainable fashion; it needs to be authentically embedded into everything we do. Digital Literacy and Etiquette need to be an internal part of our Literacy and Numeracy Curriculum in order for our students and parents to have access to it. Therefore I propose that instead of a complete and prescribed external curriculum we need to enhance our Units of Inquiry to have digital citizenship as a related concept and indeed a part of the inquiry. Digital Agreements, Hour of Code, awareness weeks like this one, are a great way to advocate and educate our community of the importance of Digital Citizenship. In order for our students to have access to a global audience through global read aloud, mystery skype and other initiatives it is indeed crucial for us to define what is Global Citizenship.

Resources

Here are some resources for the upcoming week from common sense media and Google