Digital Citizenship, Digital Footprint & Digital Literacy

This year in the media center we are teaching a class called Digital Media to a small group of seventh graders.  We are teaching them how to make videos and take photos.  The products these students create will be featured on the morning news show, our school's social media outlets and our school yearbook.

We spent the first day getting to know each other and the second day talking about what we wanted to do in the class.  On Friday, we had our first digital literacy lesson.  We talked about what it means to be a digital citizen and our digital footprint.  I hope to create a Google Site that features the products our Digital Media students create.  The first project will be a video about their lives.  Students can share video clips and/or images of things or people meaningful to them.  I want them to think about what message they are sharing online about themselves before we get started.

I used a lesson found on Common Sense Media called Trillion Dollar Footprint to lead our discussion.  If you create a free account, you will be able to access all of the materials.  To help introduce the lesson, I entered my name in the Google search engine and we discussed the search results.  Everything that came up was related to school libraries, reading and technology.  They did not see pictures or posts about my family and friends.  I explained to them that this was intentional.  I respect my kids, friends, family and myself to be selective about how much I share about our personal lives online.

My plan is to embed lessons like this throughout our time together in class to help them understand how the media they create and share ties in with being a good digital citizen.  I recently read this article via Scoop.it, "No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can't Wait" by Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner.  Definitely a good read.  I am sharing it with teachers at my school because we are all teachers of digital literacy.