Into the Driver's Seat

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Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between school bells or the strug…

“Learning to be an effective digital citizen is not something that happens if we don’t actively teach it,” Culatta says. “And preparing a generation of effective digital citizens is the most important thing we can do to ensure our democracy for the future.”

Unfortunately, many educators still mistakenly conflate digital citizenship with online safety. While teaching kids to craft strong passwords and refrain from posting inappropriate pictures online is important, it’s no longer enough. In an era of fake news and increasingly bitter political polarization, it’s time for teachers to move beyond online safety and teach students how to use technology to:

* Make their communities better.
* Respectfully engage with people who have different beliefs.
* Shape and change public policy.
*Assess the validity of online sources of information.

“Digital citizenship, it turns out, is not a list of ‘don’ts’ but a list of ‘dos’,” Culatta says. “And never has it been more important than it is now.”

Why Every Classroom Should Teach Digital Citizenship by Paul Barnwell, Teacher of English & Digital Media Students buzzed about the latest uproar on Instagram. Anonymous sources had posted a “questionable”–and NSFW–list for multiple public schools in our city on Instagram, leading to distraught girls, viral Twitter reactions, and an investigation. This type of cyberbullying and reckless use …

Student publishing is a topic Erin Murphy and I explore in-depth in Hack 10 of our upcoming book, Hacking Project Based Learning! (Update – The book is now available here!) Currently in my district we’ve had some preliminary talks regarding if/how digital portfolios could be implemented on a wide-scale. Of course, while the focus shouldn’t necessarily …

Instilling the principles of good digital citizenship can help students become smart, responsible, and respectful members of their online communities.

Want to strengthen your own ability to tell real news from fake news? Start by asking these five questions of any news item:

Tech Coach Penny Rayhill shares ten tips for awesome digital citizenship. If you’re looking for some sites to explore – here they are! Sponsor: Advancement Courses Now is the time to plan your summer! Go to advancementcourses.com/coolcat and use the offer code COOL20 to get 20% off your summer PD courses. That’s just $120 per graduate credit hour …

Digital Citizenship Week is nearly here! Digital Citizenship is a hugely important factor to K-12 education, and it's only becoming more and more imperative

"With a growing number of digital tools entering the classroom, it is now more important than ever to make sure kids know how to navigate the internet. This is likely why two of the biggest champions of ed tech — Google and ISTE — have teamed up to create a new way to teach digital citizenship.

"Be Internet Awesome, a program developed in concert with the Family Online Safety Institute, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and ConnectSafely, educates kids about digital citizenship in interactive ways, including an online game."

Whether you call it “fake news”, “misinformation” or the more innocuous “spin,” and whether you see this as an entirely new problem or the continuation of an already existing problem (think “War of the Worlds,” “Yellow Journalism” and “Dewey Defeats Truman”), one thing is clear: there is a powerful and pressing need to prepare our youth to make sense of the constant flow of media information that they consume everyday.