Digital Citizenship Collaboration Unit Reflection

Overall, this unit was extremely satisfying as an instructional designer and instructor for
effective digital citizenship understanding. When the coronavirus first hit and made the entire
country shut down in March 2020, it really affected a lot of families who depended on child care
and school to have the student and provide them with enrichment. When they were not in school
their engagement was low, nap attendance rose and content knowledge was low as well. None of
our students was applying the information we were teaching them, more than likely they were
having a sibling complete it for them. This unit from the start was to help bridge the gap between
time and knowledge lost for those kindergarten students who had absolutely no access to
daycare, pre-kindergarten, or kindergarten learning because either their parents did not feel
secure with them being in school or they had no one to watch them during remote learning while
they tried to get the bills paid and obtain financial stability within the household. I have always
had a positive relationship with Ms. Baldwin, so when I offered the collaboration with her she
was very excited about it because she said they had no understanding of how to manage
technology or understanding of really how to act. Some of the kinder students already had cell
phones and Instagram pages at the age of 5 and 6.
When I started the unit, I spent some time just walking around the classroom and
observing how they interacted with their peers and how they interacted with their teacher on a
day-to-day basis for the first week of planning. Then I had a more intimate conversation with
Ms. Baldwin about her students from her perspective and saw that anywhere would be a start for
her classroom from what she said. Then I had little meetings with the kindergarten students
where I asked them some questions in the form of a needs assessment to know where exactly
they were in their digital citizenship comprehension. The data provide me with information that
less than 50% of the 11 students assessed knew about being balanced or how to be private and
secure when on the internet. They could not even tell me what the term “digital citizen” or
“digital citizenship” was in their own example or words. From there I did my research to
effectively create a hands-on unit where they enjoyed music, laughter, peer conversations, and
hand-on activities with each other.
Every day I provided them with unique and fun experiences and activities where they
learned, engaged with me and their peers, learned vocabulary with the input of how to use it in a
sentence, while also completing an end-of-day task on the topic of the day. On the first day, they
learned about what a digital citizen was and how they can be superheroes by showing good
qualities and hearing what other superheroes had to say about digital citizenship. The data
showed that about 50% of them could tell me based on their work samples what picture they
drew that represented a good digital citizenship superhero. On day 2, we learned about a specific
digital citizenship quality “balanced” and how we can show that with our screen time with
friends and family. After doing the same type of activities they were able to participate in a
hands-on cut and paste activity where they had to paste the pictures they see to make the balance
scale balanced, then they had to tell me why it was a good balance or bad balance. 95% of the
student samples showed that they could paste the images in the correct places and tell me a
reason as to why that picture showed good digital citizenship balance and bad digital citizenship
balance. Finally, on Day 3, we learned about how the online community is like the real world
community and how we must always follow the 3 safety rules to protect our identity when
traveling near and far for information and fun. The assessment data on that assessment showed
that 7 out of 8 students that day were able to successfully tell me how they can be more secure
online and when working on devices. Most of the students score 70% or better on their Kahoot
activity.
In conclusion, I can say that my instructional activities and instruction with the students
went very well and were a success. I absolutely loved working with the kindergarten students
and they learned so much from the 3 little sessions we had together. I met with them one last
time, and did the same summative assessment from the beginning of the unit at the end of the
unit and had a conversational assessment with them. They all scored 100% with the exception of
2 questions where I can tell they got a little thrown off. The questions “What is a good balance
when having screen time?” and “ How is the online community like your real world
community?” confused them from the perspective of how they lived their everyday lives. A lot
of them play games when grown-ups are not around and some of them probably do not have
access to technology like others, so the concept of the online community benign the same as their
own community did not connect well with them.