Importance of Emphasizing Digital Citizenship

Today was the last day to turn in assignments for seniors at my school and I was reading one of the final portfolios and was reminded how important teaching digital citizenship is and stressing the importance of helping students know what kinds of pictures to post and kinds not to post.

We know about sexting incidents and adults do this as well as teens. Critical thinking of consequences of posting such items, pictures, posts, etc. isn’t exercised when inappropriate things are posted. It is common knowledge that colleges and employers regularly google candidates and visit social media sites looking to see the types of things the student/candidate has posted for the world to see.

While grading, the student mentioned a mother would take a picture of her child and post to Facebook while a teenager would post a picture to Instagram. Teens are moving to social media venues that are harder to be monitored and viewed by parents. This opens the door to inappropriate postings, cyberbullying, catfishing and meeting up with unknown people. Teens don’t think things through before they post and that is where we must be vigilant in our teachings and modeling what we post. The student whose paper I was grading gave a perfect example that students are leaving Facebook and opting for Snapchat, Kik or any number of social media apps to meet and interact with people. While this student’s examples were appropriate for the assignment and very innocuous, it reminded me that teens have made the move away from Facebook at parents and adults ‘have taken over’ the site. That is why students and parents must communicate and have mutual trust in order to help curb pictures that shouldn’t be posted or shared.

What steps do you take with your students in your classroom and conversations do you have to prevent student creating a negative digital footprint? Let’s discuss this in our comments and share ways to help protect our students.