The World Wide Web is a new world where people can hide behind the curtain of a computer screen, and act in ways that they would never be out in the open. A new ethical dilemma has appeared through the lens of technology, and the age of "digital citizenship" is among us. Students are given an open platform nowadays to participate in the online world, and teaching them how to be model "digital" citizens helps them enter safe environments, and helps them distinct right and wrong. In Making it Personal: A New Approach to Digital Citizenship, Alecia Berman-Dry holds an interactive 12-week curriculum on educating her students how to responsibly use the resourceful online tools and how to be "model digital citizens".
Berman-Dry's teaching approach on digital citizenship was interactive, and created a platform for the students to openly debate on ethical issues of the online world - such as cyberbullying. Mind you, her students were only 6th graders, but they showed a strong interest in coming to conclusions on right and wrong. Not only was there strong participation in the twelve week program, but students even gained more insight from pursuing arguments for their debates through online resources.
This approach to educating the students intrigued me the most. It wasn't just a pure academic approach of writing the NETS on the world while students mindlessly copied them down, but it gave the students time to think, time to form their own arguments, and time to reach the conclusion that they should be model digital citizens. Not only did Berman-Dry educate her students on the importance of holding themselves accountable while online, but she helped them create the pathways in their minds to lead themselves to those answer. An interactive approach created strong interest from the students, and will probably lead to higher retention on the important values they learned in the short span of 12 weeks.
Her approach to creating digital citizens out of her students was inspirational, and in the end, only created educated students that truly understood the importance of being model digital citizens.
