Digital Citizenship

Family infographics on digital citizenship play a crucial role in helping parents understand how to support safe and responsible technology use at home. Effective digital citizenship skills also helps families understand their shared role in guiding their student’s technology use. Many families come from diverse backgrounds with varying degrees of computer knowledge so teaching them good digital citizenship skills will help students in the end making for a more enjoyable and safer experience online. At no time should families feel compelled to not report bullying behaviors as they have a right to limit screen time and turn off when it is needed. Scheduling a no-technology day is a good way to limit screen time. This could be achieved by making a competition of it such as, “who can stay offline the longest”. Once the competition is over the student could make a poster reflecting on how it felt to logoff for a day and share the activities they did to fill their time. Another activity could be once in school students can create a discussion board or shared digital space such as a classroom blog where they practice respectful online communication. The teacher could model the sentence starters and students continue with their sentences. Using an online classroom blog is a great way for the students to learn and model good digital citizenship skills. As Hughes & Roblyer (2023) states, many technology-using teachers feel that using online visual resources and simulations can help raise children’s developmental levels more quickly than would have occurred through maturation.