ISTE Standards for Teachers 4: Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility.

Standard 4 of the ISTE Standards for Teachers focuses on the concept of digital citizenship. The past decade has seen an exponential increase in digital tools and opportunities, which carry the need for students to master a new set of life skills for behaving responsibly online. Even as they sit in their classrooms, they are able to connect with people across the globe instantaneously via chats, email, blogs, social media, virtual conferences, comments and more. This new capability brings great opportunity but also some risk. Many of these connections happen with strangers, who could potentially pose some of the same dangers as strangers they meet in the street. And the anonymous nature of the internet can make negative personal interactions, such as cyberbullying, even more likely.

Contrary to popular belief, however, digital natives don't pick up these skills through osmosis. It falls on parents and educators to teach them how. Just as a teacher would talk to students about etiquette and safety before they enter a public place on a school trip, so must they remind students of what's expected of them online.

Students are much more likely to understand good digital citizenship — the norms of appropriate, responsible technology use — when teachers model it on a regular basis. It is also important for all educators to spend time directly teaching and actively promoting digital citizenship. And keep in mind that it's not just one person's job to teach digital citizenship in a school, but everyone's shared responsibility.

The three social studies activities described in the table below are designed for students in grades 5-7. The objective of the lesson is to help students explore another culture and share traditions, events, customs and rituals from their own culture. There are different ways to address these objectives, but not all of them take advantage of the prime opportunity to promote and model digital citizenship.

Activity 1 shows no evidence of addressing Standard 4. To present information to the students about England, the teacher uses books and posters rather than digital resources. The students interact with the British students via the postal service, again missing the opportunity to engage with students of other cultures using digital age communication tools. Clearly, the teacher is neither modeling nor promoting good digital citizenship, since he doesn't even use digital tools.

In Activity 2, the teacher again starts with books and posters to present an overview of England to the students. This method does not exploit any digital tools to enable students to see more of the country and does not meet any of the indicators. The next part of the lesson, however, is more aligned to the standards. The teacher asks the students to use email to connect with their peers in England, and they can choose the digital tools they want to use to share more about their own cultures. The main component missing from Activity 2 is modeling of good digital citizenship.

Activity 3 meets all the indicators for this standard. The teacher begins the lesson by using technology to present information about England to the students. He models good digital citizenship by including citations for the images he uses. The teacher also promotes and models digital tools by using Skype with the whole class. Next, the teacher has the students use a safe internet program, such as ePals, that monitors activity between students to ensure that the interactions taking place are responsible. This gives students the opportunity to practice their digital etiquette in a secure environment. Ideally, the teacher would have already introduced this email program to the students in the context of a direct lesson about digital citizenship and responsible social interactions on the internet. Finally, the teacher lets the students choose which digital tool they would like to use to present their cultural traditions.

Elizabeth Leetch, an instructional assistant of special education at Captain John Smith Elementary in Hampton, Virginia, assisted in writing this article.

Helen Crompton is an assistant professor of instructional technology at Old Dominion University, Virginia. She is a researcher and educator in the field of instructional technology. She earned her Ph.D. in educational technology and mathematics education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.