After some feedback on my initial final project proposal for COETAIL Course 5, I’m focusing it on one of the components in the broader ATL picture: Social Media and Digital Footprints. Right now I’m trying to avoid the term Digital Citizenship because I’ve found that nearly everyone means something different when they talk about it. Moreover, they tend to use the term ‘digital citizenship’ in reference to ‘that thing that if only we did correctly would solve all of our tech problems.’ Silver bullets like that don’t exist, and lumping together social media, search skills, media production, and everything else doesn’t help very much.
Instead, I’m focusing on Grade 8 since they already have a unit on Citizenship throughout the ages, part of which focuses on Digital Citizenship (in this context, the term citizenship makes a bit more sense). Grade 8 also makes a lot of sense because it is the age at which students are legally able to begin accessing social media sites (ie. they have turned 13), which means that we need to be sure they understand how to manage their online presence.
