5316: Digital Citizenship Review

When I looked at the courses that I would be required to take for my Masters Degree in Educational Technology and Leadership, I noticed one that was very exciting to me: Digital Citizenship. It was something that I knew would be useful in many areas of my life related to my career and otherwise. My thoughts before starting the course focused on cyberbullying and proper digital etiquette. What I learned far surpassed those expectations.

We started learning about the nine elements of digital citizenship and the Ribble text (2015) was so clear and made so much sense to me as an educator. I did not feel that it was full of flowery language or the latest educational buzzwords. It was straight forward and succinct. Digital footprints and copyright were weeks that I felt out of my element, but where I learned a lot. I am very careful with social media and what I put out online for people to see, but what I learned reinforced that idea and prompted some interesting discussions in my class about the permanence of the internet. With copyright I have always erred on the side of caution and not copied more than a page or two out of a text book. I did learn a lot about digital copyright, which is not something I had really thought about much.

My biggest accomplishment this course was the culminating project. I used a format that was not completely familiar to me (I had only used it once before), and I like the way it came together. My biggest challenge was time management. This course had far more resources, readings, and videos than my recent coursework and with it falling during the holidays, I really had to plan ahead and carve out time to get it all done. My best work was, again, the culminating project. I put a lot of time into the preparation and process of creating it and fought with myself about what the most important digital elements were. In the end, I realized that they were very balanced and went hand in hand. Perhaps this is why Ribble didn’t seem to put more value in one over another (2015).

Because of this course, I had discussions with several students to get a better feeling for what challenges they faced online. Specifically, I had an in depth conversation with two students about cyberbullying one day. They were eating lunch in my classroom because they were trying to get some work done in a quieter space than the cafeteria. I was reading from the Hinduja & Patchin text and they asked me about what I was reading (2015). I was reading about the forms of cyberbullying and told them so. I read one of the personal accounts in the book and they enthusiastically related stories about other things they had heard of happening. Both students had been victims of cyberbullying in the past and it played a direct role in the reason they are at our charter school now. It was a very eye-opening discussion.

Overall, the Ribble text (2015) and the Hinduja & Patchin text were the most interesting to me and I think I will use the knowledge from them most often in my daily educational practice. Copyright was good information to have, but not something I run into daily and I feel like I knew most of the information from the digital footprint week. It would be good to teach this to our students in a direct way. To anyone who takes this course in the future, I would say be ready to learn a lot and spend a lot of time doing it! In the end, what you learn will be valuable to you and your students and you will be thankful for the time that you put into the course.

References

Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2015). Bullying beyond the schoolyard preventing and responding to cyberbullying. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: nine elements all students should know. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.