Digital Citizenship is something I have always felt very passionate about. I felt that I took to this assessment task feeling very confident in my ability to effectively communicate what I feel is a very important topic to talk about – Digital Tattoos and the permanency of our digital data – A topic that I feel not enough is placed upon amongst our students.
Digital security is an integral part of being a Digital Citizen (DQ Institute). As someone who prides themselves o being very aware of my digital footprint, I was not prepared for just how much had changed and just how little our students knew (or cared) about how their digital reputations can affect their long term opportunities. (Madden, M et al 2013). My guide intended to address this issue and it gave me to practice what I preach and review my security practices, I was surprised about how lax I had become in controlling that data. I’ll be honest, one of the issues I came across in creating this guide and artefact was fighting the urge to use whatever new resource I came across to review my digital footprint – an anxiety-filled activity indeed!
My process for creating my guide and artefact was approached firstly from a design perspective. I decided on using bright, on-trend, colour palettes to catch the viewer’s eye and high contrast images and writing for ease of use and readability. My chosen platform – Google Sites – is something I am very familiar with and I found that in using this platform I was able to concentrate on the quality of the content rather than spending time learning a new resource. The problem with the ease of use, however, is that is very easy to go overboard with content that can easily overwhelm the viewer – something that I hope that I have not done in my web guide.
I did, however, struggle with the creation of the Digital artefact. In my personal view, the web guide and artefact should not be viewed as singular entities but should work together in that the web guide and artefact both become digital artifacts, working together and complementing each other. For this, I chose the platform “biteable” to create a video based loosely on the “Did You Know” viral video that is so readily used by so many teachers ( but is in fact, out of date). The intention was to recreate this video using the same techniques of statistics and facts presented engagingly. I specifically chose the biteable platform as it is easy to use and creates content that is engaging for students through animation and upbeat audio. I’m not sure how successful I was in creating this.
In terms of application to the school environment – talking about and modelling the process of being proactive about one digital presence is a role that needs to be taken seriously by both educators and students. Our recent move to online learning has shown that digital fluency rates ate falling (Thomas, J et al 2021) so it is integral to ensure that we are critically using these digital resources. I feel that online guides, like this, are far more engaging to the online learner and have a greater ability to get a message across rather than traditional media.
Digital Intelligence (DQ) A Conceptual Framework & Methodology for Teaching and Measuring Digital Citizenship 2017. (2017). Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://www.dqinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DQ-Framework-White-Paper-Ver1-31Aug17.pdf
Madden, M., Lenhart, A., Cortesi, S., Gasser, U., Duggan, M., Smith, A., & Beaton, M. (2013). Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/teens-social-media-and-privacy/
Thomas, J., Barraket, J., Parkinson, S., Wilson, C., Holcombe-James, I., & Kennedy, J. et al. (2021). Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian digital inclusion index 2021. Retrieved 6 April 2022, from https://apo.org.au/node/314284
