Let’s do this!

I’m back! Another semester has begun and after a nice break away from classes, I am very excited to begin another journey. I learned so much in ECI 831 last fall that I have no doubt that this semester will be equally as fulfilling.

Gif Credit: Giphy

Looking at the proposals for the major project I began to think how I could use one of these ideas in my day to day teaching to advance my own understanding of Digital Citizenship and continue to learn about my responsibility as a teacher in educating my students as well as their families about the importance of digital citizenship. I want to consider how we can begin to look at all of our roles in working towards the common goal of our students being safe and responsible online.

Photo Credit: The Book Fairy Goddess

This year I am teaching in a grade 3/4 classroom and I feel like this age is a very important age when it comes to focusing on digital citizenship. At this age, many of the students are becoming aware of different social media platforms and many of them are beginning to explore these sites whether their parents are aware or not. They are at the age where many of them have their own devices and are beginning to build their own digital footprint online. That being said, I feel like we need to help them navigate this new world rather than believe that they will be able to make appropriate decisions without guidance and education.

This term I plan to focus on integrating digital citizenship into my daily teaching as we begin to look at the benefits and challenges of our students learning and navigating the online world. I plan to incorporate lessons from the Common Sense k-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum as well as create my own series of lessons to demonstrate different areas of digital citizenship for my students. I also plan on exploring and incorporating Ribbles Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship for Schools. These resources will act as a starting point for our exploration into digital citizenship within our classroom.

Photo Credit: Tes Teach

Once we have a basic understanding of digital citizenship my plan is to then launch a classroom Facebook page. By launching this page my students will have the opportunity to learn about a popular social media platform and begin to practice good online etiquette by taking turns updating and sharing on our classroom page. This opportunity will allow students to use their digital citizenship knowledge to practice appropriate online behavior as we use Facebook to help us dig deeper into digital citizenship with hands-on experience and media literacy learning.

Photo Credit: Fuzion

I also plan to connect with parents about their role in our digital citizenship learning. I plan to encourage parents to interact with us on our facebook page to help model appropriate online behavior. I also plan to provide parents with resources to help them learn about their roles in educating their children about digital citizenship and what they can do at home to further our learning. The article Digital Citizenship: Guide for Parents is a great resource that I plan to share with my families to help begin the conversations in their homes about digital citizenship.

Above are my proposed ideas for my major project. This is an outline of some of the ideas that I have and goals I hope to meet. I anticipate that once we get started my project idea will continue to change and grow. I look forward to jumping into another project and exploring more about this topic with my students.

Let’s get started, friends!