Part A: https://sites.google.com/view/digital-explorers/home

Part B: https://forms.gle/Xq9L3KAjPvNkAmA2A

Part C: Reflective Blog https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/shivwalker/2025/04/03/etl523-assessment-01/

Becoming a Digital Detective – Reflections on My Journey into Digital Citizenship

 

Creating a digital citizenship guide for primary-aged students has been both an enriching and demanding experience. This project pushed me to think more critically and creatively about how we engage young learners in conversations around digital safety, responsibility, and well-being. As a teacher librarian, I had already begun incorporating digital literacy into my library lessons. Still, this assessment allowed me to explore the topic in more depth across different forms of citizenship in the digital age.

 

The most challenging aspect was designing the interactive quiz for Part B – the “Choose Your Own Adventure” narrative. Striking a balance between imaginative storytelling, accurate content, and accessible language for a 7–11 audience required careful planning. Ensuring the quiz was educational and engaging meant I needed to consider visual literacy, narrative pacing, and the complexity of the decision points. However, this task also became one of the most rewarding elements. Embedding key ideas into a sci-fi adventure narrative enabled the messages around safety, kindness, and online responsibility to come alive meaningfully. The branching logic in Google Forms also helped me learn a new digital tool I can now confidently use with my students.

 

Throughout this task, my understanding of digital citizenship has grown considerably. Previously, I viewed it primarily through a safety lens. However, engaging with the resources in this module has reminded me that digital citizenship encompasses far more – including ethical participation, media balance, digital reputation, and being selective and reflective about digital content. One concept that I found particularly interesting was the concept of “context collapse” (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014), which I had not previously encountered. It highlighted the importance of teaching children about audience awareness online, as unintended and unknown people can view their posts.

Equally, the CATWOE analysis from Oddone et al. (2023) motivated me to reflect on my school’s current environment. While our digital infrastructure is intense, professional learning in this area remains inconsistent. Teachers often look to me for guidance, but my learning from this subject has made it clear that digital citizenship must be a whole-school commitment. I am particularly interested in facilitating more staff workshops and collaborating on cross-curricular units that include algorithmic literacy and ethical content creation.

 

Looking forward, I am considering how best to embed these ideas more explicitly into our library curriculum. I want to move beyond “one-off” digital safety lessons and instead build a sustained programme that spans the year groups. My assessment artefact and site will form the basis of this. I also hope to share the interactive quiz more widely with classroom teachers and involve families through printed resources such as the Family Digital Agreement and Certificate.

 

This project has given me a clearer vision of being a digital leader in education. It has shown me how creative tools and pedagogy can empower students to be safe, thoughtful, and positive contributors to the online world. I now feel equipped—and excited—to guide them on that journey.