Digital Citizenship in Elementary School

When teachers hear the words digital citizenship they can tense up and think that they are going to be asked to undertake some huge task focusing on some project of major importance. But digital citizenship, while important, doesn't have to be complicated at all. In elementary schools, it can start with something as simple keeping your iPad safe and free of distractions.

In our school, students have access to their own iPad from the beginning but keep the same device starting in 3rd grade. As they make their way through the next few years, they collect a lot of data on their devices and sometimes run out of storage space by 5th grade. Managing storage space isn't part of our curriculum but we decided this year to teach students how to monitor and manage available space on their iPads with two lessons called Digital Cleanout.

In addition to solving the practical problem of free space, students learned responsibility and how to decide what to keep and delete over a few short lessons. We kept it simple: if the photo/video/file is important to your learning, keep it. If not, delete or move it to a home device. Learning about storage space and doing some digital cleaning is something that doesn’t come naturally to some students (or grown ups) so teaching it explicitly can help plant the seed of responsibility and eliminate distractions for learning in the future years.

Keynote slide from our Digital Cleanout lesson for 3rd Grade students at St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo.