Digital Citizenship Blog #7

 

How can digital literacy be integrated in Math, Science, and/or Healthful Living classrooms to show teachers' digital competencies and to address ISTE standards for Educators? 

I believe the best way to teach digital literacy is to integrate it into the curriculum. Have students use websites, social media accounts, etc to complete assignments and discuss the importance of the way that they use the platform. For example, for math they math be asked to research data and use it to create a graph. In this example you can discuss with students creditable sources and what sites not to use. For healthful living, they may be discussing the importance of exercise. Lots of students are currently into Tiktok, have students create Tiktok videos as PSA's for importance of exercise. In this example you can discuss the importance of privacy and appropriate things to do on videos on social media platforms. For Science, students may have to do research on a topic and be required to create an infographic for what they find. The possibilities are endless, however I feel that its best to integrate digital literacy into the curriculum, instead of trying to give students a list of do's and don'ts. 

How can we better support teachers' digital citizenships and their teaching through teacher professional development? 

Gleason & Gillern, mentions three perspectives of digital citizenship. The first one mentioned was normative perspective, which focuses on students knowing the "rights and responsibilities" of being a digital citizen. The second perspective views digital citizenship as the capacity to participate in the society online. The third perspective outlines the strong relationship between participation online and digital citizenship which requires proficiency in the ability to produce, collaborate, share, and critique media using technologies. In reading each of these the Twitter platform is what I instantly thought about. As an educator I currently use Twitter to share what I am doing in my classroom and to see what others are doing in theirs for ideas. It is an online form of a professional learning network. One way we can begin to better support teachers is by showing them through PD the value of Twitter and requiring them to create an account and use it to network. This will help grow teachers' digital citizenship capacity, which will then spill over into their classrooms and instruction.