Just as we need to be ‘good citizens’ who know how to conduct ourselves within society, we also need to be ‘good digital citizens’ who know how to act when working in the digital domain. Digital citizenship is about learning how to engage within the digital domain safely and ethically.
One of the biggest problems I find with this subject area is that it covers so many issues. Howard Gardner and his colleagues in the ‘Good Play Project’ have identified five key areas of digital citizenship: Identity, Privacy, Authorship and Ownership, Trustworthiness and Credibility, and Community. We can use this framework to help us to get a better overall view of the issues and incorporate it into a lesson plan to help our students build a better understanding of the topic. The lesson plan below is aimed at B1/B2-level students, but you could adjust the content and make it work for a lower- or higher-level class.
Lesson idea
Part 1
Write the five key areas (as above) on the board. Explain to the students that these are topics related to digital citizenship. Explain to them what digital citizenship is and ask them to work in groups and discuss what they think the topics are about and what types of issues might be raised under each one. Afterwards, ask some of the groups to share their ideas with the class.
Part 2
Give the students the following list of issues. Ask them to match each issue with the topic(s) it relates to. This will help them to understand what sorts of issues are related to each topic.
- Tom has opened an anonymous email and clicked on a link that appears in it. He now seems to have a virus on his computer.
- Paul has copied half a page of text from an internet site and put it in his essay.
- Maria has taken some pictures from the internet and used them in her video mash up.
- Iwona has hundreds of friends on Facebook that she doesn’t know.
- Paulo has posted pictures of himself on the internet which show him holding a fake gun.
- LuLu has received a horrible text about a classmate and shared it with her friends.
- Tatiana is using a website for her studies that a friend has suggested to her.
- Pablo is using the password ‘123’ for his Facebook account.
- Sophie has included her address and telephone number in her online profile.
- Tom has created a website where students can write what they think of the director of the school.
When they have finished, go through the answers with the class.
Suggested answers
1 Privacy and Trustworthiness and Credibility (Opening up anonymous emails is an issue of privacy, as it provides a very easy way to hack information. It is also an issue of trustworthiness, as you should never open something when you are unclear about the source.) / 2 Authorship and Ownership / 3 Authorship and Ownership / 4 Privacy and Identity (Remember that your identity is not only what you have posted about yourself but who your ‘friends’ are and what you have written and uploaded.) / 5 Identity / 6 Community / 7 Trustworthiness and Credibility / 8 Privacy / 9 Privacy / 10 Community
Part 3
Ask the students to work in groups and go through the ten issues. For each one, ask them to decide:
- What is the problem?
- What advice would they give to the person involved?
Here is an example for issue number 1:
Problem
Anonymous emails may contain viruses or, worse, may allow the sender to hack your information if links within them are opened.
Advice
Never open emails where you do not know the source, and certainly never click on links sent by people you don’t know.
After going through the issues with the students and seeing what advice they have suggested, you might find that different groups see the issues in slightly different ways, and they may suggest different advice.
You might want to get the students to turn their advice into rules and make posters to display these on the walls.
Hopefully this will help build up a picture of the five key areas which are covered by digital citizenship and provide a framework which will help both teachers and students to get a better understanding of the types of issues that emerge around the topic.
References
Gardner, H and Jenkins, H ‘Appendix: How we got here’ In Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World The Good Play Project/Project New Media Literacies 2011 https://dmlcentral.net/wp-content/uploads/files/Our_Space_full_casebook_compressed.pdf
Good sources of information and videos:
www.nsteens.org
www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/the-good-play-project
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
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