Assignment 1 for ETL523 had many challenges. The most challenging aspect for me was turning my ideas into reality in relation to the website and the video. I had very clear ideas about how I wanted the website and the video to look, but executing the ideas required a lot of practice in new skills, including manipulating HTML code. I have built a website once before using ThinkSpace, so I drew on that experience but challenged myself further by implementing features such as drop-down menus. I had to find my own information about how to do this, since this is not provided through the ThinkSpace user guides. I have never made a video before either, so that came with a new set of challenges with learning how to use unfamiliar software.
One aspect of this assignment that I found interesting was digging deep into Mark Ribble’s 9 Principles of Digital Citizenship, as outlined in ‘Digital Citizenship in Schools’ (2015). I have gained further understanding about areas of digital citizenship that I hadn’t considered before, including digital commerce and digital health and wellness.
Through doing this assignment, I would like to be involved in having an explicit digital citizenship program implemented at my school. All students at my school have a school-provided laptop and a range of, but not all, digital citizenship practices are embedded into the curriculum through teaching and modelling. After exploring through the range of skills required to be a capable digital citizen, I feel we are doing students a disservice by not providing explicit teaching of digital citizenship skills. A lot of these skills are assumed knowledge, but this is not a safe assumption to make. My school has a technology user agreement, which is generally a list of items such as ‘I agree to use my laptop in a responsible manner’, but no further instruction is given afterwards.
Using Ribble’s (2015) 9 Principles of Digital Citizenship as a framework, the students would benefit from explicit teaching of all areas of digital citizenship through the House Tutor Program. Students meet in their vertical house groups two times a week already so a possibility would be to implement a ‘skill of the week’ to be explicitly taught during one of the two sessions.
References
Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools (3rd edition). International Society for Technology in Education.