Today's students have technology available to them twenty-four hours a day. With both the opportunities and challenges of a digital world always present, it's important now more than ever to emphasize and model appropriate digital behavior to your students.
However, finding ways to incorporate digital citizenship topics into your existing curriculum can be tough, especially when you might not be required to cover these topics in class.
Digital Citizenship Week offers an opportunity for all educators to teach the importance of safe, responsible behavior in an ever-changing digital world.
Every year, the third week of October is dedicated to teaching good digital citizenship in hopes that all students will be intelligent and safe when using technology.
So how can you take advantage of this yearly push to teach your students to become reliable digital citizens?
In this post, you'll discover a full week’s worth of Digital Citizenship Week activities and ideas for 2024!
You'll learn about how you can teach digital literacy and citizenship topics each day of the week to ensure your learners are prepared to make responsible decisions.
Monday: An Introduction to Digital Citizenship
There’s no better way to start out the week than to introduce your students to digital citizenship!
Good digital citizenship is focused on using responsible, respectful, and ethical behavior when using technology.
For your introductory lesson, you’ll need to do a bit of work up front.
Write up a few scenarios that involve someone making decisions when using technology. You should include scenarios that show both good and bad digital citizenship choices.
Some example scenarios to get you started include:
- Doing online research without fact-checking (bad)
- Posting a rude social media update about a classmate (bad)
- Not opening a suspicious-looking email (good)
- Reporting cyberbullying to parents or teachers (good)
Read each scenario and ask your students questions about whether someone has made a good or bad choice. Ask them to explain their answers to spur discussion and get thinking about what makes good digital citizenship.
Now that your students have an idea about what digital citizenship means, reflect on the consequences of safe or unsafe digital decisions.
Refer back to each scenario that contained a poor decision. For each one, go into some details about how that bad decision will impact that person in the future.
For example, individuals who take part in cyberbullying could negatively affect their opportunities to get accepted to a school or even getting hired for a job. Help your students understand that digital citizenship impacts their reputation, including how they are viewed by colleges and potential employers.
Understanding the differences between wise and poor decisions is a critical first step in helping learners recognize the importance of digital citizenship.
Tuesday: Understanding Digital Footprints
On Tuesday, you can get more into the details of digital citizenship — specifically digital footprints.
A digital footprint is essentially all of the information people actively and passively share about themselves online.
Start your lesson with an overview of a digital footprint. Then give some examples of what makes up a digital footprint, including:
- Browsing history
- Photos they post
- Social media status updates
- Emails they send
- Ads they click
After you’ve gone over the details of what assets make up a digital footprint, reinforce what you've taught with a class activity!
Before class, download and print this digital footprint handout to give to each student.
As you pass the papers out, instruct your students to draw or write common websites and social apps they visit. Give your students a decent amount of time to gather their thoughts and get everything on the page.
Once they have finished, hang the sheets on a wall in your classroom. Have students reflect on any common trends they see among their classmates when all of the pages are up.
Overall, this lesson will provide an eye-opening experience to your students. They will be more conscious of their actions moving forward so they can maintain a positive digital footprint in the future!
Wednesday: Information Literacy
With students subject to a constant influx of information and disinformation, it's important to include a lesson on information literacy during Digital Citizenship Week.
With print media, it's often easier to spot a good source of information. But when looking at websites and social media, it can be tricky to know what’s real.
There are many resources out there to teach information literacy, but not all of them are age-appropriate. Consider materials that meet your students where they are with teachable lessons on how to determine a reliable publication, discern potential bias, and evaluate the overall credibility of a resource.
Depending on how you want to tackle this topic, you may want to consider focusing on evaluating the news, or look at resources that will help learners complete reliable research projects.
Once you have the sources you want to reference, consider using them alongside information literacy literacy lessons from a trusted curriculum provider. In addition, you can also supplement your lessons with instructional ideas of your own.
Regardless of what you choose, the point of information literacy is to ensure your students can tell real information from disinformation.
This will also lay the foundation for your digital citizenship week activity on Thursday!
Thursday: The Basics of Internet Safety
Similarly to information literacy, it’s important to talk about internet safety.
On the surface, being smart and safe when using the internet seems pretty simple. But students who don’t know any better can fall for online scams, click unsafe links, and use easy-to-crack passwords.
Not knowing how to stay safe online can be a big problem, so it’s important to teach the basics now!
Start this lesson by asking your students a few questions to spur discussion:
- Have you have ever received an email from someone you don’t know?
- What about getting a friend request from someone you’ve never met?
- What did you do, and how do you know the person was telling the truth?
You can let these questions serve as a springboard into a conversation why it’s important to be on guard when using the internet.
Encourage students to share other times they’ve run into something that doesn’t seem quite right when on social media, sketchy websites, or their email.
Then, transition to talking about some key points of internet safety, including:
- Verifying someone’s identity
- Verifying a link is safe
- Using strong passwords
- Identifying an online scam
Give your students tips to stay safe as you discuss each point. This is important because your students need more information than just knowing what to look out for.
You need to give them the tools to realize something isn’t quite right before it’s too late!
Some examples you may want to include are:
- Carefully checking URLs
- Using social network privacy settings
- Creating a strong password
Overall, you want your students to leave the classroom with more knowledge on how to keep their information private. Teaching internet safety during Digital Citizenship Week can give them the confidence to show others how to stay safe online!
Friday: Digital Communication & Cyberbullying
On Friday, take time to wrap up your Digital Citizenship Week activities with two final sections: digital communication and cyberbullying.
Digital communication includes any form of communication that involves the use of technology, both for personal and professional reasons.
Cyberbullying is the means of using digital communication to harass others.
When it comes to teaching digital citizenship, these are two of the most important topics for you to cover!
Part 1 — Digital Communication
At the beginning of class, start a discussion by asking students to share how they communicate by using technology. As they respond, list their answers at the front of the classroom.
It’s likely that your students will mostly give examples of personal digital communication, such as texting and social media.
Once you have some solid answers, ask them how they think they will use technology to communicate in their future careers. Add any new answers to the board, and if there are repeats from before, underline those.
Last, ask your students which types of communication could negatively impact their future if used irresponsibly.
As your students respond, circle their answers. Ask them to give an example of improperly using digital communication that made them choose that option.
Once everyone has given their input, switch gears to talk about social media more in-depth. This is one part of digital communication that requires a lot of discussion — specifically in terms of cyberbullying.
Part 2 — Cyberbullying
While it’s an emotionally difficult topic, it’s important for you to include cyberbullying as part of your activities this week.
Teaching your students how to identify, stand up against, and report cyberbullying is crucial and could be one of the most important lessons you teach all year.
No matter what resource you use to talk about cyberbullying, just make sure you discuss what constitutes cyberbullying, tips to stand up against it, and how a student can report cyberbullying to someone in your school.
If you want to go even further, you could discuss the laws and future repercussions that someone can face if they partake in cyberbullying.
Overall, you want to empower your students to stand up against cyberbullying and give them the tools to do so!
Prepare Your Class for Digital Citizenship Week
Every October, Digital Citizenship Week gives teachers the chance to lead classroom lessons about the online world. These activities give students the opportunity learn important concepts such as information literacy, internet safety, and cyberbullying that can help them live and work appropriately in a digitally-driven environment.
In this article, you've learned about five different lessons you can use to teach students during each day of Digital Citizenship Week. When you follow this instructional plan, you'll be able to empower your learners with the knowledge they need to navigate the world around them.
But teaching digital citizenship doesn't have to end after just one week. Consider how you can teach and reinforce sound digital literacy with iCEV.
When you use iCEV's Digital Literacy and Career Exploration Curriculum in your middle school classroom, you'll be able to introduce your students to critical concepts that will help them develop as digital citizens and be prepared for the future.
The curriculum comes complete with multimedia lessons and interactive projects and activities you can use to teach digital citizenship any time of the year!
