My mobile forecast lies in the use of existing technology to create a digital citizenship scaffold. This is a place where students and their families practice digital citizenship competencies together. The idea is to develop good digital habits within an intermediate intranet stage before graduating onto the internet.
The subject of digital privacy and fake news have been common themes in many of our posts this session. In my own work as an informal educator, I have discussed and explored issues that upper elementary students have encountered when using the internet. It appears that teachers are aware of the gaps in digital literacy, and parents are aware of the dangers to privacy, and students are aware of the public nature of the internet, and yet problems from digital communications abound.
How is it that actions we would consider unacceptable in our current society are unmoderated online? With all the resources currently available to educators and famiies, there appears to be a missing step.
Please watch my video to see my proposed solution.
Addendum:
My key points for this forecast are:
1. The intranet is akin to the school playground community, where children and their adults can mingle as family units. This socializing within the school community will ideally become a habit of posting together.
2. The AI moderator is constantly available to guide members on the appropriateness of their posts; adults and children will be encouraged to discuss their unit’s messages before posting, or to make adjustments after posting, so that they learn to respect each other’s digital footprint.
3. The AI will be programmed to include “online traps” to help members discern fake news, phishing, and other unfortunate elements of the internet.
4. The intranet will grow with the child. Each school has its own intranet. Unlike the internet, the intranet can stop at the graduating grade level of one school, and restart fresh with the next school level.
5. The intranet allows younger children access to social media outlets while accompanied by their parents or guardians, with the AI moderator as their “training wheels”. As these children grow, they will most likely move onto the vast world of apps with their own personal mobile devices, and the continued use of the school intranet could be an anchor linking their online world to their family.
I welcome your thoughts in the comments section.
Hi Evelyn
I think this a timely and important topic of discussion. We often talk about the notion of netiquette and digital citizenship without actually teaching our students and children about it. I think your idea of an intranet as a soft entry into social media is wonderful. I also think the content of digital citizenship you mention in your presentation is very relevant and has inspired me to revisit this important topic with my classes. I like the idea of a school based community where the norms are learned at home and school and the transitory nature of developing the skills learned at home can be used in school and vice-versa. I see potential for more meaningful parent-teacher interactions regarding online presence and dealing with online issues such as cyberbullying before they snowball. One challenge I see, is students in Junior high may not buy into this. Providing incentives to be a part of the intranet are likely to be a challenge after upper elementary school. I think you did a great job of presenting the big picture of digital citizenship and your presentation was engaging. I also like how you referenced relevant student posts such as Jennifer R’s Adaptive Learning Pandemic Response, Brittany Hack’s “Mobile in a World With AI” and Elixa Neuman’s ” AI Companies Supporting Mental Health”. Overall, a great primer on digital citizenship as well a well thought out solution to the issues that plague our online spaces.
Hi Evelyn,
I’m actually amazed that this idea has not been implemented somewhere, as it just makes sense. How often do we discuss scaffolding and providing supports for learning in every other area of education? Your future cast does a thorough job describing the resources available for improving digital literacy and explaining the theory behind why your idea would work to make better digital citizens out of both children and their parents. Digital literacy and digital decision-making are going to be part of every child’s future, and as parents we tend to either over-protect or let our children loose on the internet, while at the same time modelling the behaviours we don’t want children to mimic. There are digital literacy components to most education curriculums and teachers are most likely addressing many aspects, but it would be fantastic to have a way to practice and learn from mistakes without them causing irreversible problems. So many of the bullying and harassment issues between teens involve social media, with no regard to the kinds of social norms that exist in face to face environments. Having already experienced raising one online-gaming addicted teen and facing the possibility of another, I recently read The Tech Diet For Your Child & Teen (https://www.amazon.ca/Tech-Diet-your-Child-Teen-ebook/dp/B07PHHC2QX), and while it advocates reducing internet time and guides parents through a process that results in less time spent online, it does not address how to behave and interact online. Since children learn many behaviours from their parents, I really like that the School Family Intranet would educate parents and facilitate discussion about what the entire family deems appropriate to post online.
Hi Lori,
I hope that this idea will spread! As this is a forecast, there are elements I could not cover. I would envision a working committee of all involved parties, from students to family members to educators and other interested parties building the site, setting the rules of engagement and establishing the online culture. This would be an ever-evolving online world that we would build, to scaffold good digital citizenship in our ever-evolving digital world.
One question that I have not been able to answer is that of the digital divide. How can this School-Family Intranet work when a family or neighbourhood has low access? I would love to have others speak to this, and help find solutions to this very real problem. Along the same lines, how will such a platform work with people who have very little free time to spend with their children already? I wonder if Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) as proposed by Sean Gallagher would offer a solution to this question – so long as we can cover the security and privacy issues!
Thank you for your book suggestion. I could not find it in my Libby-based libraries, so I may need to visit a store.
Hi Evelyne,
Thanks for the food for thought on digital citizenship, your initial overview was very thorough! I was in a meeting recently with a tech and innovation team at my school and there was a discussion about the language of digital citizenship and the idea that it is becoming so ingrained that maybe it should just be citizenship – i.e. it is just part of being a good citizen and maybe shouldn’t be separated out. On the other hand it is so important that maybe we should continue to isolate it so it continues to be highlighted.
I like your idea of the school-family intranet as a safe system for practicing with much lower risk. My initial wondering was whether or not cyber-bullying that currently takes place is usually within a child’s existing social group. If that’s the case, then that risk would still be there with an intranet. I think an essential component of your plan is the guidance and monitoring by family and school – this is the important component that we are not doing a great job with now. Do you think that the development of this formalized practice system would create more incentive for families to monitor their children’s digital interactions? Might it also have the effect of making children think more about what they post, since they know they could be monitored? It would be so interesting to see if this could help students learn to be more responsible and compassionate (digital) citizens!
Hi Janice,
I also came upon the discussion of how citizenship is an overarching term that should encompass digital citizenship. The issue that I see is with the modes of delivery; good citizenship can be taught in our physical world, and digital citizenship does not yet have this platform.
My ideal intranet would have children and their immediate family posting as a unit, so that each child is guided with the posts, and (hopefully) will be better informed as to what is considered appropriate in terms of digital communications. I am envisioning this starting at the K-2 level, when child are more amenable to their parents’ opinions! If the child grows up with this intranet, then the immediate family will be more involved in the child’s digital life – at least in school. Just as we cannot hover over our children as they move into their social circles, we can only give them enough foundation to be “good” online.
When it comes to cyberbullying, the School Family Intranet would need help. We need to develop a prevalent kindness in the school culture to overcome the hurt comes from the stress of ostracization. There are groups such as Kind Campaign which go into schools to promote kindness in girl-to-girl peer programs, and school policies (example from Guelph District School Board) that give guidance to all members of the school community. This instills the culture, and may mitigate negative behaviours, simply from bringing an awareness of the impacts the digital world has on our “real” life.
I can only hope to spread this idea, so that eventually families can model good digital citizenship just as we strive to model good citizenship!
Evelyne, you’ve changed the way I view Digital Citizenship!
Societally speaking, we talk a lot about cyberbullying, privacy, all things digital citizenship. And yet we so rarely think of online social presence and interaction as simply another form of physical social interaction. It’s so obvious now that you point it out! We wouldn’t send children to a playground without adult supervision until they were old enough to take care of themselves, respect others, and practice good judgment.
Another well-informed point you make is that the Village would also teach adults at this point. Most parents got to know social media as a young adult or older. We certainly didn’t know it would turn into the social and public space it has become. The challenge of the village, as you say, will be to not only educate children but their parents as well. We don’t hang photos of our family on the exterior of our houses. We don’t shout our child’s toilet training progress down the street. Why would we publically share that information online?
I am curious about how feasible you think the Village would be to actually roll out. I imagine parents and older children would be present on standard social media as well as the closed intranet. It may be difficult to generate authentic engagement because families’ social circles exist outside of that closed circuit. That is a challenge I’ve faced as an early childhood educator trying to drum up parent engagement on private Instagram accounts for daycares. How do you see it working in practice?
Thanks again for sharing your insightful idea. It will certainly inform my behaviour as an educator and parent!
Hi Lyndsay,
I am glad to have shifted your view of digital citizenship!
The School Family Intranet is meant to bring an awareness of how the real world links to the digital world. The implementation of such a community requires foresight and planning, for we are creating a new cultural habit. We need to shift the stream, and steer the flow towards a step-wise ladder of learning before leaping into the vast ocean of the web. We would need to lay a foundation of digital exchanges, and there will most likely be a school requirement for the families to partake in intranet activities.
Online activity is already happening in my schoolboard at the administrative level. Parents are required to enter the online portal to register for school activities, process administrative work, and get report cards. Beyond the administrative work, there is a burgeoning of engagement between teachers and families on Google Classrooms and similar sites, though this has been bumpy! I am thinking of all the photos and videos I get of my child’s classroom activities on Google Classrooms and Class Dojo. I keep going back to check for more!
The School Family Intranet would need to build these exchanges into social connections, and to maintain them through online events. At the moment, only the teacher can post. If each family had a page, then they could post as well. I would rather the IT department create the structure of the site, though the developing beta versions would benefit from the organic growth – just as it is better to see the path that people take across a lawn before laying the sidewalk 🙂
I can foresee committees that would take on the responsibility of building up the different aspects of the site, and a few pilot schools that would start the cultural movement of the digital family unit. Ultimately, we would need to bring parents and children onto the school intranet as their school social network, and then use their new awareness to continue in the unfenced world wide web.
Thank you for your thoughts!