Schools have always been a great gateway for students to learn the transferable skills they need for their professional and social lives. The relevancy of technology in our day and age is sky rocketing and students need to learn how to be functional digital citizens when they are engaging with online tools when connecting with others.
In the school that I am currently working in there is a great support for the use of technology in the classroom. This includes a network that is labelled RPSD-BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) that students are able to connect one of their personal devices to. This is all great and students are learning how to efficiently and professionally work with their devices and collaborate but the problem that we have ran into is the fact that you cannot monitor what each student is on all of the time. In these instances I have caught students snapping (Snapchat lingo) others with other students in their photos. Having other students in photos without their consent…is a problem and most students do not realize this. At the beginning of every school year we send home consent and waivers for parents or guardians to sign off on to make sure it is all right if the school can take photos of their kids and use them. Most forms come back with a “yes”, but some come back with a “no”, in these cases we have to be careful as to what pictures we are sharing. Students seem to think that they can take a picture of anyone without their permission and post it to social media, and this is where the hard lessons are learned.
In an article titled Digital Citizenship there was an interesting point made, “Helping those not online to access the internet is important, not only from an equality and social justice point of view, but on the basis of the economic case.” (pg. 51). This quote made a lot of sense as not all of the students that walk through our doors have a device let alone the internet. So it is incumbent upon us to help and educate students about the importance of having healthy digital citizenship’s and teaching the tools they will need in order to function in a healthy way online.
Looking to the future and the future of education with digital citizenship is hard because the sky is the limit with technology. It scares me to a point as the teacher in me wants to control what is going on with my students, but the curious tech learner inside of me becomes really excited. I can see social media becoming a more prominent aspect to classroom learning and digital citizenship. Through the use of apps like snapchat, twitter, tik tok, Pokemon Go, etc. student engagement will rise and so will their ability to be responsible with their digital citizenship. I, for one, am hesitantly excited about the prospect of growing digital citizenship IQ for future generations, I just need to let go of the reins.
Adam Scott Williams 
Great post! I think you raise some really good questions when considering how to teach digital citizenship to students. You are completely right that students don’t understand it’s not okay to take pictures of anyone and everyone they see and there is definitely an education piece that is missing. I think the difficult thing with this topic is that it is not black and white, and there is no answer to the questions. We use our judgement every day as teachers and that can be very powerful and a little scary like you said! We just need to ensure we move forward with the best intentions and think about how we teach our students about these incredibly important characteristics!
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Absolutely, as educators, we just need to do the best job we can to lead. It helps when we use examples of how we could improve our own digital citizenship as well. Students like to see that!
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Great post. ‘Letting go of the reins’ can be a tough thing but it looks like you also realize that you have to ‘take of the tether’. There may be some rough waters on the sea, but it looks like you are creating an environment in which you are a lead learner and you are going in with eyes wide open. Look like you are establishing some strong norms … kids used to write notes and other things back in day (which is not as public as social media) but were off task then too. Also enjoyed your comment about the digital divide and how schools need to help close the gap.
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Nice post Adam. On your comment about students snapping other students without their permission, that’s definitely a problem. I watched a YouTube video a few days ago with this guy who was filming in public, and he was super mindful the entire video of not capturing anyone’s face with their permission. the line “I’m just filming for YouTube, do you mind if you are in the video?” must have been said 100 times, and there are a lot of people’s feet in the video haha. It just reminded me of how hard it can be sometimes to respect people’s privacy… when I’m out in public though, I think the expectation for privacy is quite low. But in a school, we have to maintain the highest standards of privacy, which is also quite difficult when everyone has a device.
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