Throughout my EDLD 5316 Digital Citizenship course at Lamar University, I had the opportunity to learn about digital citizenship. During this course, I examined in detail, the nine elements of digital citizenship, broadened my understanding of what a digital footprint is, explored the laws regarding copyright, and dove into one of the biggest issues plaguing our society, cyberbullying. According to Code.org (2018) Digital Citizenship is about being someone who acts responsibly, respectfully, and safely online. This was the overall theme that I rolled with from the first week and onward.
My biggest accomplishment during this course was when I completed my animated video titled Empowering Digital Competency. This video explored the nine elements of digital citizenship and the issues currently facing society regarding digital citizenship. This was a challenging task to do as it brought every aspect of the course into one central story. However, I very much enjoyed working with PowToon to create this fun little animated video. I had used PowToon in the past, but not like I did for this project. For this project, I was able to fully write out a script and essentially make a animation based on that script. It was a lot of fun, but also very time consuming. In fact, this whole course was rather daunting. I spent several hours on multiple nights during the week working on the assignments. I often averaged about 3-4 hours of sleep per night. This class was very exhausting, but I learned a lot. This part of the course was my favorite part of the course because I enjoy challenging myself with technology.
The concept of a digital footprint truly stood out to me as a foundational concept for digital citizenship. Our digital footprint can be shaped by us, but it can, unfortunately, also be shaped by others. Understanding what exists in my digital footprint is essential in my future career that I hope to obtain. If I want to be a digital leader, I must ensure that I am safely practicing responsibility and respectfulness always online.
Creating a mantra was a very unique task that I had to accomplish. The mantra that I have chosen is Empower Digital Competency. I feel that these three words say so much regarding what it takes to be a digital leader. We must be competent in what is going on around us. We must know the laws. We must be aware of what is occurring on social media. By knowing these things, we can have the confidence that we can effectively lead our peers along this journey.
This course was slightly outdated during the time that I took it. There are constantly laws and cases that are taking place that, if you are not careful, you can be left behind. For anyone that is expecting to take this course in the future, I would strongly recommend that you invest the time in the readings and try to keep up with all the current events regarding digital footprints, copyright, net neutrality, and cyberbullying. Invest time into learning new technologies for your projects. Have fun with it. Additionally, before you begin, go ahead and look at my video about digital citizenship titled, Empower Digital Competency.
Below are a few additional resources that I found to be useful for this course:
References
Code.org. (n.d.). Digital Citizenship. Retrieved February 25, 2018, from https://code.org/curriculum/course3/20/Teacher#Vocab