Digital Citizenship

     On top of teaching new technology skills applicable in the classroom and the software and hardware that could be used thence, this "Technology Application for Education" course should also emphasize much of the digital safety skills that teachers and students should learn. This set of Digital Safety presentations fulfills the latter part and could go into much more depth with a larger set of minds coming together to produce ample creativity and add ideas from different perspectives. With the four separate presentations, students had the opportunity to research their assigned topic, make concise presentations summarizing the issues of the topic, and become something short of a "professional" on their topic. Topics covered include sexting and textual harassment, cyber-bullying, phishing and pharming, & copyright and fair user practices.
    In this increasingly digital age, children need to be increasingly media literate and more "tech savvy" than those of the previous generations, or even their older siblings. The concept of digital safety, especially in terms of Web safety "has become a fundamental topic in our digital world and includes knowing about one’s Internet privacy and how one’s behaviors can support a healthy interaction with the use of the Internet" (Common Sense Education, 2017). Out of many presentation-teaching styles, the style taken in this set of presentations may be one of the best ways to teach digital safety to students in secondary (and post-secondary) levels of education. It allows for peer-to-peer teaching and learning that in a way allows them to connect more to those presenting in the ways that they understand the topic. Educators like Whitney Poucher and Donnie Piercer have initiated efforts to teach digital and Internet safety and etiquette in their classrooms (Schwartz, 2018 & Piercer, 2018). Poucher recognized that students as early as in Kindergarten level are consistently connected to digital and Internet media and is teaching the need for, as Schwartz smartly entitled it "Cyber Hygiene" (2018). Piercer pushes for her students to understand the need to be "Internet kind" in order to protect themselves and their community of peers (2018). It is within these efforts that the contemporary child should learn not only how to use digital and Internet media, but also how to responsibly use said media and stay safe digitally and physically.
     In retrospect, the way that we did our presentations did not seem entirely cohesive in any sense but the broader topic of "Digital Safety." Individual presentations did, in fact, touch on the main points of their topics, but I believe that they could use much more material somehow, especially my topic of "Copyright and Fair User Practices." It was amazing that the other presenters could find local laws and statistics regarding their topics, but since Copyright responsibilities are more of an international legal issue and not something strictly local, it is extremely difficult to find pertinent and specific issues other than those that already exist on the international Web-base. Otherwise, as a unit of education, it did serve its purpose of teaching lesson-based material, but I feel that it could amount to so much more than it was if there were more students to create larger groups to present. Unfortunately, we were unable to work together towards the same presentations as that would ruin the magic that is the "suspension of learning" but it the presentations fulfilled their purpose nonetheless.

References:
Common Sense Education (2017). Internet Safety.  Retrieved from https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/internet-safety

Piercey, D. (2018). How to Help Students Stay ‘Internet Kind.’ Education Digest, 83(6), 29–31.

Schwartz, S. (2018). Schools Teach “Cyber Hygiene” to Combat Phishing, Identity Theft. Education Digest, (1), 4.