Book Review: K-8 Digital Citizenship Curriculum

Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between the school bell’s chimes or the struggling budget of an underfunded program.

Now, education can be found anywhere, by collaborating with students in Kenya or Skyping with an author in Sweden or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on a class project. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders, available 24/7 from wherever students and teachers find an internet connection.

This vast landscape of resources is available digitally, freely, and equitably, but before children begin the cerebral trek through the online world, they must learn to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This conversation used to focus on limiting access to the internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) that students would be discouraged from using this infinite and fascinating resource.

It didn’t work.

Best practices now suggest that instead of protecting students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent in the use of the internet.

This 70-page text (click for a peek inside) is your guide to what our children must know at what age to thrive in the community called the internet. It’s a roadmap for blending all the pieces into a cohesive, effective student-directed cyber-learning experience that accomplishes ISTE’s general goals to:

• • Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology

• • Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity
  • Demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning
  • Exhibit leadership for digital citizenship

Each grade level includes 3-8 lessons with a hands-on project for each lesson. That’s 46 lessons and 46 projects–a full year of instruction for K-6 in non-sequential order so it fits nicely into your school schedule or current technology curriculum, with a project for each topic. Here’s a schedule of what topics are covered at which grade level. Some start in kindergarten and are reinforced each year. Others, we wait until students have the maturity to understand the concepts:

You also get nine pages of digital citizenship links–over a hundred–as resources.

To order, click here.

Digital delivery within 24 hours. Print delivery–expect 4-7 days