Digital Citizenship@OSS

At Oakleigh State School we are committed to building and maintaining a culture of respect, friendship and community.   Digital Citizenship plays a very important role within this work along with the associated need to be cyber-safe and cyber-aware.

We also are familiar with the challenges associated with the teaching of digital citizenship:

  • the rapidly changing nature of technology and the online world.
  • the need to be ‘ on the same page’ as our community.
  • the need to provide structure and boundaries for our kids whilst at the same time allowing them the space to make mistakes from which they  learn.

In working towards consistency and structure for digital citizenship education this week with our teachers,  we provided teams of teachers with a number of key resources to support them to design learning experiences for this semester.  From this we planned to create a Semester Overview which would be shared with our parent community.  These resources included:

  • The content descriptors and elaborations from the Digital Technologies Curriculum which have relevance for digital citizenship
  • Our school vision.
  • The basis for our respectful and responsible culture at Oakleigh SS – our ;Oakleigh Pillars’ and the ‘You Can Do It’ Program.
  • Advice by the eSafety Commissioner pertaining to respectful online behaviour.
  • An image from the Economic Forum encouraging the building of a positive digital footprint

 

Our teachers were encouraged to browse these resources and to then brainstorm the kinds of activities that they thought would support the development of digital citizenship in our students.    From these we filtered the ideas and came to agreement about  the focus learnings that would feature in the overview for the semester.

Concurrently, our community are about to ratify our CyberSafety policy document – the final piece of work needed to finalise our eSmart accreditation.  This document will allow us to provide very clear guide-lines to our community about our approach to cyber-bullying and cyber-safety.

Across the school, teachers are approaching the teaching of digital citizenship with creativity and rigour.   One example is in Yr 6 where the students will work to examine our draft CyberSafety policy document and then to take on the role of a marketing manager for a Digital Citizenship session that the Yr 6 students will facilitate.  This work will form the major component of their English Assessment work, serving to enliven several areas of our curriculum whilst making their investigation into digital citizenship real and relevant.