Week 8: Digital Citezenship

    
After reflecting on my instruction in regards to digital literacy, it was clear that I need to be much more intentional with my instruction. There are plenty of resources out there to help me, as an educator, develop engaging lesson plans to teach students digital citizenship (without sounding like a lecture to my students). On the Kentucky Department of Education website, they have a link to a "Digital Drivers License" which it looks as though it offers different learning tracks for educators, students, and parents. This seemed to be a tool that provides presentations as well as quizzes and checks for understanding. It looks to be rather information dense and would likely aid in delivering information to students and their parents. I really liked the Digital Passport from the Common Sense website. While it seems rather rudimentary and basic, I played a few of the games and they were engaging, simple to understand, and guided students through simple digital citizenship principles. The resource I was most impressed with was from Google’s, Be Internet Awesome tools and resources. Most notably their Be Internet Awesome curriculum and the interactive game, Intraland. Intraland is a role playing video game where students are guided through this world called Intraland. The controls and gameplay are very similar to what students are likely familiar with in other games they might play at home. This looked awesome and I couldn’t help but try it myself! I locked in to this game for about 30 minutes as an adult. The first mission is to deliver positive “vibes” to characters that are sad and to defend them against the cyberbullies. Basically you collect heart shape tokens and use those to give out “likes” and other positive messages to characters that are sad. I have only made it through the first few components of the game but I plan to use this in connection with my instruction in digital citizenship. I would probably play each level before students to understand what part of digital citizenship the level is targeting. Then, I would focus my lesson on that component of digital citizenship so there is more context to the game they are playing. I really think my students will love this game!


Comments

  1. Dr. ThomasMarch 8, 2021 at 12:29 PM

    I had to laugh about you getting "locked into" the game. That has happened to me before with virtual manipulatives. I like Common Sense because it is aligned with standards, including ISTE.

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