Integrating Digital Citizenship into Social Studies Classes

EDTC6433

ISTE Standard 4

My triggering question was “How can I integrate digital citizenship into my social studies classes?”

A couple of weeks ago, we had a “Future Ready Day” at our school.  We had invited community members to come into our school to talk about their jobs.   We were short a few spots, so it was decided that we would fill it in the blank spot with a presentation about digital citizenship.  Since I am on our district’s Tech Summit committee I was asked if I would be willing to present.  The slide presentation had been prepared by our secondary technology coach so we just needed to present it to the 6th graders.  It focused on how fast and easy technology has made life for our students and even though it is really cool and helpful, it has pitfalls and students need to be aware of those.  It was so well received by our students that we plan on including it in the future.

Between making this presentation and my research for ITSE 4, I was reminded that we need to continually educate our students how to be digital citizens in this global world.  Since we do research in our social studies class it seems like a logical place for us to talk about “safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources”.

As we realized our ancient Asian culture project need to some major tweaking, we split up the work between the 7th grade social studies teachers.    My job was to work on the rubric for the projects to make sure it was teacher and student friendly and included everything we expected the students to have.   While working on it,   I advocated for requiring that students create a bibliography and as you can see in rubric below we have done that.

This last couple weeks, to help our students be successful with this project, we have been modeling the projects with our current unit on Imperial China.  As we have been modeling the projects, we have showing students how to create a bibliography and cite information correctly.  This has become so easy and fast for students to do with technology.  I use http://www.citationmachine.net/

while others are using http://www.easybib.com/   Although, not perfect, they are a start.  I have also been showing students where to find citation information on the discovery education and online encyclopedia our district subscribes to.  I show them how to copy and paste that information into a google doc and create a bibliography.  With how easy and fast it is to create citations, there really is no excuse not to give credit to others work.

We also talk about “safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology” when students are looking for pictures.  Unfortunately, people can tag their pictures however they wish, and sometimes they tag them so inappropriate images will come up when students are searching for images for their projects.  We have taught our students that if this happens they need to close their computer and let an adult know.  They have learned this throughout their time in our district so luckily it has become second nature for them.  

We use to have our students get their pictures off of flicker.com because they could sort them and only have creative common pictures, but then they started require an email.  Our students are too young to have an email,  so this wasn’t an option any more.  Then we found that they could get pictures by searching on  https://search.creativecommons.org,  but would often just do a google search.  This past week in our hangout as well as in the article The Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons we learned about http://www.photosforclass.com where students could look for appropriate creative common pictures that have also been screened for appropriateness.  On top of that when they download them into the presentations it automatically puts a citation on them. This is a great resource that  I plan on using this as we go forward with this and other projects.  

I think that it is important that we take the opportunities that present themselves to teach our students to be good digital citizens throughout our lessons or conversations we have.  As can be seen I do have the opportunity to teach my students to be good digital citizens by teaching my students the “three pillars” of respect, educate and protect (REP) that I read about in the article, Middle School Digital Citizenship:  What Students Need to Know and Why while “advocating, modeling and teaching safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources” while working on research projects.

Although, I have been focusing on just one portion of ISTE 4, I have been thinking about how we are can incorporate the other parts of ISTE 4 into my socials studies classroom.

First, by doing this project with all of our 7th grade students we are also addressing the issue of providing equitable access to technology to all students that Erin Cook focused on with her article, 5 Ways to Make Technology More Accessible to More Students.  Since being equitable does not mean equal, we also are trying to find resources that are on multiple grade levels or can be read to the students so that all students can be successful.

Secondly, we have the opportunity in our social studies classes to “promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information” through teaching our students to peer editing skills.   This is perfect moment to teach students to THINK ( is it True?,   is it Helpful?, is it Inspiring?, Is it Necessary?, and is it Kind?) before they make a comment or post.   Many materials are available from https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship to help teach these skills.  

Lastly,  although I haven’t been good about doing this,  as teachers we can “ develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital age communication and collaboration”.  I thought of the idea of following twitter feeds that was shown during our hangout session showed a fast and easy way for us to do this.

Miller, J. (2016, March 24). 5 Ways to make technology more accessible to more students -.

Retrieved November 18, 2017, from

https://www.teachthought.com/technology/5-ways-make-technology-accessible-students/

Watanbee-Crockett, L., Middle school digital citizenship: What students need to know and why. (2016,

December 08). Retrieved November 15, 2017, from

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/middle-school-digital-citizenship

Walters, S. & Burt, R.,  (2017, August 08). The educator’s guide to copyright, fair use, and creative

commons. Retrieved November 19, 2017, from

https://www.theedublogger.com/2017/01/20/copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/