Best-selling author and educator Jason Ohler addresses how today's globally connected infosphere has broadened the definition of citizenship and its impact on educators, students, and parents.

Learn how to develop a meaningful approach to embedding digital citizenship into an established program, helping your students succeed in a digital world. In today’s schools and districts, just saying “no” to bad technology practices is not enough. This leadership posture can take the form of extreme blocking and filtering of websites, providing little access to devices and declining to integrate digital tools and resources into learning out of fear of what else a student might do. Such a mindset can also lead to adults choosing not to engage -- or being unable to engage -- in conversations when students share stories about what a peer did online or through the latest app. Digital citizenship curriculum needs to be taught at two levels at once -- horizontal (the world immediately around students) and vertical (connecting to the rest of the world). This book provides education leaders a strategic road map that demonstrates how to incorporate these concepts into the curriculum so that digital citizenship isn’t just “one more thing,” but is threaded into the DNA of how educators teach and work. The book: • Provides a five-year-plan for developing a digital citizenship program in your school. • Covers such topics as digital ethics and leveled approaches to digital citizenship. • Walks through the digital citizenship responsibilities and opportunities inherent in various roles, including library media specialists, classroom educators and special ed teachers. • Offers strategies for spreading digital citizenship internationally and explores the future of digital citizenship. The book offers school and district leaders a path toward a shared and collective understanding so that digital citizenship is embedded in the way students and educators interact with technology and each other. It is a guide for school communities to discover which practices, in the end, will lead to better people.

Supporting children and young people to participate safely, effectively, critically and responsibly in a world filled with social media and digital technologies is a priority for educators the world over. Most young people in Europe today were born and have grown up in the digital era. Education authorities have the duty to ensure that these digital citizens are fully aware of the norms of appropriate behaviour when using constantly evolving technology and participating in digital life. Despite worldwide efforts to address such issues, there is a clear need for education authorities to take the lead on digital citizenship education and integrate it into school curricula. In 2016, the Education Department of the Council of Europe began work to develop new policy orientations and strategies to help educators face these new challenges and to empower young people by helping them to acquire the competences they need to participate actively and responsibly in digital society. This volume, the first in a Digital Citizenship Education series, reviews the existing academic and policy literature on digital citizenship education, highlighting definitions, actors and stakeholders, competence frameworks, practices, emerging trends and challenges. The inclusion of a wide selection of sources is intended to ensure sufficient coverage of what is an emergent topic that has yet to gain a strong foothold in either education or academic literature, but has received wider policy attention.

Digital Citizenship in Schools, Second Edition is an essential introduction to digital citizenship. Starting with a basic definition of the concept and an explanation of its relevance and importance, author Mike Ribble goes on to explore the nine elements of digital citizenship. He provides a useful audit and professional development activities to help educators determine how to go about integrating digital citizenship concepts into the classroom. Activity ideas and lesson plans round out this timely book.

This title brings together original research on digital citizenship from working with hundreds of K-12 students. This readable guide includes sample lesson plans, worksheets, suggestions of teaching models, assessment tools and more. With this book, any educator can help bring digital citizenship to their students, colleagues and organization.

Tackles personal interaction when using technologies and the role of digital citizenship in classrooms.

This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting. Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship. The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting. Digital Citizenship examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century.