In thinking of where to start for my digital citizenship project, I was drawn back to the nine elements of digital citizenship discussed by author Mike Ribble (2015). At the beginning of the course, I felt sure that digital health and wellness was the most important element to my students. After reading other discussion posts and rereading some of our text, I found myself reconsidering. Cases could be made for each of the nine elements. I decided to go back through the text and take some notes.
As I started typing some thoughts to try and start some sort of script for my project, I looked closer at the essential questions for each element in the text and started thinking critically about my current school and the last district where I taught. Each had strengths and weaknesses in the elements, but the student population and situations are very different, so there are different needs for each. I still didn’t have an answer about the most important elements or elements. So I shifted my focus to the mantra.
As I watched the videos provided in class, I quickly recognized that a mantra is not the same thing as a mission statement. Mission statements tend to be wordy and have more flowery language. Mantras are short, easy to remember, and straight to the point (Verma, 2007). I tried to categorize the nine elements into groups and realized that it had already been done by Ribble. “Respect, Educate, Protect” is the mantra that I chose because it encapsulates not only the nine elements, but exactly what our goals should be when teaching our students to use the internet. Surely one of these three words should have more importance than the others. This could be how I chose which element(s) to focus on. I still couldn’t bring myself to choose.
Respect includes Etiquette, Access, and Law and refers to respecting yourself and others while using technology and the internet. Educate includes Literacy, Communication, and Commerce and refers to educating yourself and others while using technology and the internet. Protect includes Rights and Responsibilities, Security, and Health and Wellness and refers to protecting yourself and others while using technology and the internet. So which is most important? The first conclusion I drew was that Educate should be the most important, obviously, because that is our goal as teachers, right? But in order to educate, you must also protect students and teach them to respect themselves and others. I came to similar conclusions when I picked each of the other two. I went back to the instructions for the assignment and saw that the instructions said that we may choose to focus on one or more topics. Since I could not decide which were more important, I decided to focus equally on all of them.
Now I had to decide what format to use for my presentation and create a storyboard or script for it. I looked at my notes and started organizing them into something usable. For each of the nine elements, I wrote the definition and some essential questions provided by Ribble (2015). I thought about some of the programs that I could use to create the presentation. I have used Power Point, Prezi, Google Slides, and Powtoon to create presentations recently. I knew I didn’t have time to properly learn a new program, so I only considered these. I enjoyed Powtoon the last time I used it and wanted to explore it deeper. I started a new slideshow and sifted through their templates. I didn’t see anything that struck me. So, I created my own from scratch. I made a slide for each of the nine elements and their definitions and a slide for essential questions for each of the elements. I tried to keep them somewhat uniform but have some variety. I struggled with what style I liked and the limitations of the free version. Finally, I gave in and purchased the educator license for a year. I like using the program, and I am sure I will put it to good use this year. Then I can reevaluate this time next year and decide if I want to renew.
I looked through the characters in each style and decided that I liked the characters in the whiteboard look best, so I started there. I created the slides with the definitions first and then went back in between each definition to add the essential questions. Then I had to think about how to frame the presentation. Who was my target audience? Why would they be watching this presentation? I decided that my target audience would be teachers and this would introduce a program to introduce the nine elements to our students. Next I created some introductory slides to inform the teachers why digital citizenship is important and why our students should spend time learning about them. Then I added a title slide and my reference slide.
When I was finished, I spent a lot of time working out the timing of the slides. When things should appear? Should anything disappear? Were the actions similar to other slides so it looked cohesive? Then I added transitions between slides and had to work on timing all over again. I noticed that some transitions took more time and that time was taken from one of the slides, so there wasn’t enough time for the audience to read it all. After working out the timing, I planned to record myself reading the slides and perhaps adding more detail. I had some technological difficulties at this point. The microphone on my laptop was picking up a lot of static on the first slide. I tried a few simple things, but short of taking my laptop to Computer Geeks (and anyone who teaches knows that December is not a good time to be without your laptop), I was at a loss. I tried to record a few slides to see if it was bearable, but I was not at all happy with the product that I was creating. Also, I found it difficult to work on the timing of the slides with my voice. I feel like Power Point is much more user friendly in this aspect. I looked at my product again, and felt that it didn’t need narration, and it was already almost four and a half minutes, so I didn’t want to risk doing extra work and making it too long. Then I would end up taking the narrations out again anyway. So, I moved on to selecting music for the background and published the video.
Overall I am pleased with how the project came together. If I had not been working to keep the time under 5 minutes, I may have gone further in depth with each element and given positive and negative examples of each. Depending on who the audience is and how long I would have for a presentation, I would consider adding more detail. My one regret is the difficulty that I had in recording narration. If it was not final exam time, I would have borrowed a microphone from our tech apps teacher to do it. I know that her students were using them for their semester projects, though. If I were to redo the project or use it in front of an audience, I would narrate using my own voice.
References
Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: nine elements all students should know. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
Verma, J. (2007, November 16). Don't write a mission statement, write a mantra. [video file]
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT7xlFTinIw
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