Digital citizenship is something that we all learn how to navigate as we use various digital means. It is the idea of understanding how to use the internet and a variety of digital mediums.
I would say that my digital citizenship is quite informative of internet technologies for websites. My digital footprint is on a few social websites and apps such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat. I am learning how to troubleshoot issues on Google apps and issues with accessing certain domains. I started my digital footprint when I was in high-school. My first social media website was Facebook back in 2007, when it first came out and was only accessible through the web.
My digital citizenship is based on balancing the amount of time I spend online browsing Facebook and Instagram. I try to set a limit and have these apps hidden in the background on my phone in effort to reduce my time online. I think it’s important to have a healthy balance between using social media and finding time to de-plug from the digital world. I find that if I’m browsing online, I can get consumed in the materialistic world of glamour and that time could have been used to read or go for a hike which I much rather enjoy. I found it so easy to just sit there on my phone browsing, scrolling endlessly for hours with no aim in mind however, hours would go by and afterwards, my head would feel heavy with information yet, I felt as if I had consumed meaningless data.
Recognizing the validity of sources is also important to understand as a digital citizenship. We learned this early on in high-school and I took a more in depth course in cybercrime at University where we discussed online privacy and methods of online crime. It was interesting to see how computer criminals could decrypt codes. We also learned how to do some of our own coding. I found this useful as years later I was supporting students to do online and paper based coding which entailed creating your own codes.
Here below are a few websites that discuss digital citizenship and digital footprint. The common sense website is a great resource that I have used for teaching students about digital citizenship and their digital footprint. There are many tips on these websites that discuss how to use the internet safely and how to protect your private information.
https://builtin.com/cybersecurity/digital-footprint
https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/lesson/the-power-of-digital-footprints
