Netiquette through the eyes of a 8th grader

via GIPHY

As I moved forward with my final project I decided that now that I had my Digital policy put in place for my classroom it was time to focus on the three elements of Ribble’s Nine Elements of digital citizenship that I wanted to teach my students. I had decided early on in the course that my students needed work in three areas; Digital etiquette, Digital Law, and Digital rights and responsibilities. I made the decision that I was going to focus on one of the elements per week for three weeks.  It so happened that I taught Digital Etiquette my first week.  This blog post is going to share the results from that teaching along with the lesson plan that was used.

Digital Etiquette

It is important to restate that coming into this class I was not the most aware digital citizen on the internet.  I felt that the only way that I could benefit my students and teach them proper digital citizenship was to first learn with them.  I decided that the best place to start was focusing on Digital etiquette. According to Digital Citizenship Education in Saskatchewan Schools digital etiquette “…describes the standards of behaviour in online spaces or when using technology”(p. 15).  It also states that the key considerations for schools and school divisions when focusing on digital etiquette is 1) Ensuring that students use technology in ways that have positive effects on others and 2) Ensure that students communicate appropriately given the context, audience and purpose.

I believed that my first task was to identify what social media platforms my students using to communicate or impact themselves and others.  I wanted to use these platforms in my lesson.  Ultimately I made my students choose the social media platform that they used the most and follow a webquest that I put together using ideas from a webquest done by Ms. Pedly. In my adapted webquest my students were asked to find out a series of digital etiquette questions and create 10 digital etiquette rules for the social media platform that they were using (and explain the significance of these rules).  Here is the link to my lesson plan with a rubric that I used (Digital Etiquette WebQuest).

Results

As my students worked through this webquest it quickly became apparent that they were having more trouble then I thought they would.  I had to continually stop them and explain my expectations over and over again. They did not know what I meant by 10 rules.  It was not until another teacher walked in and stated that I meant it like the 10 commandments in our Catholic faith but only with using the app that they had chosen. After my students got started on their rules they did a very good job and I believe that they quickly learned the importance of digital etiquette. It gave them a chance to find out what netiquette was while using a social media platform of their choice.  Here are two examples of work produced Example student work 1      example student work 2