Digital Citizenship
Updated: Dec 3, 2019
This course was filled with many great opportunities to learn from and has been enlightening that corrected my perspective about concepts that I thought I knew. Digital citizenship is important to educate students, teachers, and parents so that everyone is protected and safe from the potential dangers of the internet. The nine elements of digital citizenship represent responsibilities, respect, and kindness. In understanding digital citizenship, the importance to teaching students to be respectful and kind online, in a world where there is a vast community online, it’s also important to teach individuals about the consequences of cyberbullying. Through understanding cyberbullying and digital citizenship, we can create an online world that is fair and a community that looks out for each other.
In reading Mike Ribble’s text (2015), the nine elements of digital citizenship reflect the notion that students need to educate themselves on the use and new points of technology, protect themselves against the darker sides of technology as well as others, and respecting individuals in their online community (Ribble, M., 2015). Digital commerce, according to Mike Ribble (2015, is the most difficult element for teachers to address specifically for the reason that this deals with purchasing of items online as well as the identity theft problems. In a middle school viewpoint, most students don’t run into this particular problems because they rely on their parents to purchase items for them. The only factor that would be problematic is students purchasing game add-ons for their free games that they play on their tablets or phones.
Oftentimes, young individuals might purchase items without the knowledge of the money value needed for their additional in-app purchases. There have been many cases through the news of this particular problem. Case in point, in 2014, Apple gave parents refunds from in-app purchases made by their children. Parents were finding out that their children were making purchasing from within their games to get more help or more addition that would help them win a game, these purchases were as high as twelve thousand dollars to about a thousand dollars’ worth of purchase made by children without their parents knowledge (Whisenand, T., 2014). This is a prime example of educating children about digital commerce especially when game apps are free but have the hidden in-app purchases. Parents having conversations with their children that although games may be free they should purchase items for their games without parent permission. Also, some games in Apple, actually are password protected to where children have to get their parents to use the password from their parents. It is also important that parents keep their passwords secret from their children to prevent any accidental in-app purchases.
This course has brought in a lot of knowledge for me with some difficulties. I definitely had trouble in the first week when I misread and missed the video presentation that I had to create for the assignment 1 tab. It is definitely not my best work, but given the opportunity, I would like to redo that presentation because I felt that it definitely didn’t express my full knowledge and understanding of the nine elements of digital citizenship. I would say my best work came from Week 4 particularly the understanding of cyberbullying. I felt the case studies were my strongest points because I spent time annotating the parts of the case and clearly points of the case. Also, I truly enjoyed what I was reading and learning about those cases. This made me more mindful of the issue resulting in cyberbullying. I think this will help me in helping students become better digital citizenship and create a world that is kinder online and in person.
Reference
Ribble, M (2015). Digital citizenship in schools: Nine elements all students should know.
Eugene, Oregon: International Society for Technology in Education.
Whisenand, T. (2015, March 31). Apple lets parents get refunds for in-app purchases. Retrieved
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