Digital Citizenship 2/18/20

Digital Citizenship is something our entire school “does” five times per year for one hour. Each teacher has a class of about 10 students and we follow lessons from Common Sense Media. It’s very possible that other teaching on DC is happening during STEM class but I’m not aware of anything. Outside of this, there is no formal training in this area. I don’t know the history of why we have scheduled DC lessons this way and honestly, it’s not something I have considered adding to science class before this week. I assumed that by 7th grade, students were well versed in digital safety and citizenship. This probably isn’t true and brings up a lot of questions:
“What is the embedded training in grades 4-6 around Digital Citizenship? Why does our school teach only about online safety? What is my responsibility as a science teacher to embed training into my class time? Could RTI or study hall time be used for this?”
The whole school culture at GMS remains foggy to me. I’ve been teaching there now for 6 months and the only whole-school rule I could point to are “no hoods” and the obvious “be nice.” In my last school, we had a strong advisory program and part of the onboarding in September was to have the entire student body collaborate to create a Middle School Contract for the 6th-8th grade.  I would like to see something like this in at least our 7th grade team next year. 

While Digital Citizenship wasn’t directly included in our Middle School Contract,  I agree with Anne Collier from Davis' Edu-topia article. The digital context is just that; another space in which we as  community co-exist. If the rule in the hallway, classroom, and cafeteria is “be nice”, so too should the rule stand in a digital space. I wonder if the students would see it this way; I expect they would. Part of the discussion would be how to interpret these societal rules like “be kind, be safe” for each context and deliberately include digital spaces in this discussion. Middle school is about learning to navigate social norms and expectations in accordance with one's identity. Digital Citizenship is just another testing ground for this time of exploration however, it uniquely exists as an overlap of the school/home world. This means that both teachers and parents need to play an equal role in providing guidance and boundaries in this amorphous space.

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