From a PDHPE teacher of 15 years to training as a Teacher Librarian (TL) I don’t think I could have been anymore out of my comfort zone with the creation of an online digital citizenship guide or digital artifact.
Researching digital citizenship concepts from global, social, cultural and personal perspectives was the easy part. I found my personal knowledge and experiences surprisingly aligned well with my findings through research. I only say surprisingly because my knowledge now had terminology associated with my thoughts and meanings.
The choice of digital citizenship task focussing on online gaming for students was a no-brainer as this topic has taken up a lot of my thoughts being a mum of an 8-year old ‘gamer’. I’m often delving into the unknown worlds he plays in and wondering if I am teaching him to be a thoughtful digital citizen. Being able to make connections between the online world our young people are engaging in and relating them to critical issues surrounding digital citizenship development was important.
Without a doubt the creation of the digital artifact was the most daunting task of all. I honestly procrastinated this by drawing too many mind maps of ideas. I gathered information around developing different types of artifacts, I watched many youtube tutorials on ‘Minecraft’ and ‘online gaming’ and ‘safety and parental controls’ and ‘chat settings’ etc et etc. I even had a school student of mine give me a lesson on creating websites, screen recording, iMovie and Minecraft education.
It’s funny though that the most challenging tasks are the best teachers! I now have so much more knowledge and interest in a specific topic I knew little about. Since starting this assessment piece, I have now created a digital citizenship unit of work for my stage 2 and stage 3 students to implement next term. I have also been given approval to purchase Minecraft Education for our school.
So, Thank you ETL523 for challenging me and teaching me more than I expected!