Digital Awareness
As educators we help our students be successful at school by explicitly teaching and practicing appropriate behavior and expectations. We are increasing our time spent in a new environment – a digital environment. Just as we would take time to explain and reinforce how to behave in a new school setting, we need to do the same in a digital setting. This is where digital citizenship comes into the picture.
Digital citizenship is more than cyberbullying and creating a strong password. It is how to treat one another with kindness and respect while interacting in a digital space. It is creating evaluative skills to identify scams or false information. We live in a “copy and paste” culture, digital citizenship teaches our students how to respect creative copyright as well as protect their own digital creations. These skills and ideas cannot be addressed in a one-time lesson. Digital citizenship should be an ongoing conversation that educators and parents have with students.