5 Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Citizenship Every Day

We often hear from educators who feel like they don't have the time to address digital citizenship in their classrooms. And with all of the to-dos and pressures that teachers face, it's easy to see why! Plus, state standards and other demands can make it hard for administrators to mandate it.

At the same time, the daily cellphone use of 11- to 17-year-olds includes getting hundreds of notifications, picking up their phones over 50 times, using them for four hours or more—and using phones during school for about 45 minutes. If these numbers applied to, say, exploring the wilderness, we'd make sure they learned survival skills! 

In fact, kids' online lives are an exploration of a limitless wilderness of ever-evolving opportunities, distractions, and dangers. And now, with generative AI in the mix, a whole new frontier is revealing itself. So how can we equip kids with the Swiss army knife of online skills they most definitely need?

Here's the good news: Though teaching targeted lessons is the ideal, digital citizenship can be integrated into everyday teaching, no matter the grade levels or subjects you teach. 

Below are five key ways you can weave in those online skills that all kids need, every day.

Integrate Our Quick Activities

Whether you teach first graders or high school seniors, our 15-minute, video-based lessons are a super easy way to work in discussions on digital citizenship. This bank of activities can be used in homeroom or advisory periods, on days when you have a wacky schedule, or when you want to facilitate relevant, lively discussions in your core classes.

Use the Research Process

Across classrooms, research skills are key. And now that generative AI tools and search summaries are in the mix, there are more opportunities—and challenges—for teachers and students to find and recognize accurate information. Check out the following ideas to boost your students' media literacy and research skills:

• Search smarter. These Google search tips will provide students with fundamental skills to seek out and assess more accurate sources and information. 
• Fact-check! While some social media platforms have rudimentary fact-checking, it's still important to equip students with skills and resources to fact-check like a pro.
• Explore the pros and cons of AI. Generative AI isn't great for researching some topics, so it's important for kids to know what it can and can't do well. Educators can read this article for information and then get some tips. This set of lessons for grades 6–12 can help students understand what AI is all about.
• Address media literacy. This is a huge component of digital citizenship, and there are several ways you can assist students in assessing the credibility of information. This includes checking for bias—both from sources and personal confirmation bias, and also being aware of how to identify credible news on social media.

Build Skills in Off-Screen Communication, Media Balance, and SEL

To actually practice media balance, understand their impulses to pick up a device, have in-person communication, and more, kids need to build these off-screen skills. Start by considering the following:

• Don't ignore "soft" skills! Here are some ideas for promoting mindfulness, building face-to-face communication skills, and more.
• Take learning offline. Fostering a range of opportunities for creating, listening, moving, reflecting, and giving back are positives in any classroom, and these skills and habits can transfer when it's time to take your teaching back to digital spaces. 
• Create positive norms for discussion. This matters for both in-person and online discussion. For young students, what does it mean to be kind online? For high schoolers, how do we communicate with civility?
• Model balance and distraction-free time. If you're checking your own phone, students notice! It's smart to create a classroom framework with allocated time or lessons for maintaining attention, focusing, and integrating movement.
• Have students reflect on their own technology habits and how they align with their values and goals. You can even have a screen time challenge that prompts kids to pay attention to how and where they're spending their time online.

Article

Easy Ways to Connect SEL to Common Digital Dilemmas

Use these tips and activities to link SEL to online life.

Use Media to Start Discussions

You can also use popular media—movies, books, podcasts, and more—to spur conversations about digital citizenship. Use the provided discussion questions or go into more depth by pairing them with our lessons.

• Use this list of books to further explore digital citizenship. For example, elementary teachers can pair The Couch Potato: The Food Group, Book 4—a story about a potato whose screen-based life is disrupted when the power goes out—with this lesson on media balance. 
• Check out this list of 25 films to spur engaging discussions, from The Truman Show to Hidden Figures, West Side Story, and more.
• Start discussions about AI using media and our built-in discussion questions.
• Try one of our movie-related lesson plans with active viewing guides that relate to SEL and digital citizenship.
• Sign up for our newsletter to stay up on current online trends that you can then discuss in class.

Make Core Subject Connections

We can't possibly offer an exhaustive list of ways to weave in digital citizenship (and you can probably make creative connections to your own curriculum better than we can). But below are a few ideas that may inspire you to think of even more:

STEM

• Use our research about cellphone use as a data set in a lesson on mean, mode, and median, and work in some discussion of the findings. Compare it to another study: Why might there be differences?
• Throw in some facts about brain chemistry during a biology lesson—specifically about how many of the apps on our phones are designed to manipulate that chemistry.

ELA

• Do a project on fair use and generative AI's role in it, as real-life debates are ongoing. What do your students think?
• Ask how literary characters might present themselves online through a social media feed. How would those characters be affected by the digital world?

Social Studies

• Integrate current events and talk about how to determine what news is credible and how to identify hoaxes and fake news and videos, which are proliferating with AI.
• Examine how, historically, people received news and how that process has changed over time. How do confirmation bias and conspiracy theories come into play?