Digital citizenship describes how a person should behave in the online world. Frequently, when schools create policies and programs around digital citizenship, they are primarily the content of an acceptable use policy enhanced with an educational component that focuses heavily on protecting students from online predation and cyberbullying.
Global citizenship is a well-understood concept relating to how one participates in and contributes to the world as a whole. What then is global digital citizenship, and how does it connect online behavior to one’s participation in the global community?
Since 2000, we’ve experienced the creation, expansion, and assimilation of the digital world. Before, there was the digital world, which was accessible to a limited demographic, and the physical world, in which we all lived. Through the rapid expansion of wired and wireless data, combined with the explosion of devices capable of connecting us to this network, we live in a new reality that contains both the digital and the physical worlds. Digital, connected technology is as much a part of our daily lives as the microwave and refrigerator, which are now also connected to the Internet.
As the digital world is part of our world, digital citizenship is a component of global citizenship, and is in fact only one of the facets of global digital citizenship that we discuss in this book. It does, however, have the capacity for a tremendous impact on who we are as members of the global community.
Therefore, global digital citizenship addresses how we participate and contribute in the blended physical and digital worlds, and how we can leverage the digital world to grow citizens in this new reality. Indeed, we dedicate the work of an entire foundation to this fundamental goal.
Global Digital Citizen Foundation
This book is a natural extension of our Global Digital Citizen Foundation (https://globaldigitalcitizen.org). You see, we have a strong commitment to be leaders in the global transformation of education. Our focus has always been in moving beyond the curriculum content and capitalizing on the opportunity to utilize education to allow children to develop and thrive as whole beings. Indeed, this was always an objective of education, but its focus on standardized testing of content led to content-focused teaching. It left to chance the development of important life skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, and compassion.
As a way to address curriculum while ensuring the development of valuable life skills, we developed what we call the essential fluencies, which we outline in our book, Mindful Assessment (Crockett & Churches, 2017). We see the emerging importance of developing and evaluating these life skills in the shift toward competency-based curricula that we see in several countries, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.
We founded the Global Digital Citizen Foundation with the hope that this work would grow beyond us as authors—that the work of the essential fluencies would grow to empower students to strive together to solve problems that matter and create bright futures for all beings. To that end, we are actively seeking organizations and professionals who share our vision and want to contribute to and expand our vision. We hope that this book will inspire you to work with us to help develop a generation of students into exemplars of global digital citizenship.
Structure of This Book
This book, which we wrote primarily for K–12 educators and administrators, consists of seven chapters on global digital citizenship and three appendices with reproducible resources you can use to support your students. Each chapter ends with a Guiding Questions section to gauge your learning and progress.
We begin chapter 1 with a look at how to evaluate your school’s existing acceptable technology use policies and how to update them to reflect the values of global digital citizenship. From forming an advance team to establish the policy’s purpose, clarity, and rationale, to creating effective strategies for implementing and supporting it, this chapter lets you hit the ground running.
Chapter 2 discusses the essential traits of the global digital citizen. How can we best develop a student’s sense of personal responsibility? How do we teach students to be both good digital and global citizens? What practices bring out their sense of altruism and environmental stewardship? These are all questions we answer.
Chapter 3 focuses on developing sound global digital citizenship agreements that establish key criteria for students taking responsibility for themselves, for each other, and for property. Chapters 4–6 extend on this work by focusing on how you can tailor your technology use agreements to support everyone that must support your students outside the school’s walls—the teaching community, the student community, and the wider community.
In chapter 7, we wrap up with a look at embracing teachable moments, including two specific examples of schools whose students reaped the benefits of embracing sound global digital citizenship practices. We also provide a series of learning scenarios you can use in your K–12 classrooms to instill good citizenship thinking and practices in your students.
Finally, we include appendices that provide even more resources you can use. Appendix A includes a series of exercises rooted in learning about and tackling global events and issues that you can use to create mindful moments for your students. Appendix B includes a series of reproducible activity sheets you can use to engage students in understanding the importance of digital citizenship guidelines. Appendix C includes sets of reproducible digital citizenship agreements applicable to students at three learning levels (primary or elementary, middle, and high schools), teaching professionals, and the wider community.
With all this in mind, let’s get started!
| chapter 1 | Evaluating Your Acceptable Use Policy |
All schools have at least one acceptable use policy that governs how students use technology within school walls. Frequently, these policies are based on restricting or controlling the use of or access to technology, information, or websites. They often specify a list of sites that are not acceptable (Facebook, for example), behaviors that are not permissible (like using someone else’s login details), or technologies that students should not use (personal devices like smartphones, for example). This policy-focused style seldom provides any rationale for school and district decisions and rulings, and it is far from all-encompassing. The policies often address only specific sites, technologies, behaviors, and software—limiting what they cover. They are, at their core, an ineffective means to teaching students how to be good digital citizens, let alone good global digital citizens.
If you want to effect change in your school’s digital culture, a critical starting point is understanding where you are. In their book, Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) discuss the importance of knowing where you are, understanding where you want to be, and then using the difference between these—the gap analysis—to develop your plan for reaching your goal. You can apply this concept in assessing your school’s or district’s acceptable use policy.
In this chapter, we examine the process for establishing a thorough set of ethically driven acceptable use guidelines, which will form the framework for your digital citizenship agreements, by working through the following stages.
• Forming an advance team
• Establishing your purpose
•