Digital Citizenship Week is the perfect time to celebrate the components of digital citizenship at our schools by learning, practicing and polishing up the skills we have as educators, and sharing those skills with our students. 

As I prepare for Digital Citizenship Week at Van Meter Community School in Iowa, there are five resources I’ll be using as we celebrate from the library and in the classrooms throughout our school community. 

The following resources will support our PK-12 students, teachers and families all year long. 

1. The Achievery 

This is the perfect time to add the amazing new resources from The Achievery to our plans, bringing them to all our students in elementary, middle school and high school.

Created by AT&T in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery and other partners, The Achievery is a free digital learning platform that helps connect students to a new world of digital learning through stories that spark curiosity and content that entertains as well as teaches. 

The platform features clips from some of the most popular, well-loved movies, TV shows and cartoons from Warner Bros. and Cartoon Network, paired with lessons and learning activities that students can engage with everywhere they are – at home, in the community or the classroom.

Under the digital literacy lessons and video clips, there are several to choose from that our students will love. 

2. Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media has a free award-winning digital citizenship curriculum for students K-12 focusing on media balance, online privacy, digital footprint, communication and cyberbullying, media literacy and more. 

The Common Sense Media K–12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum was designed and developed in partnership with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and guided by research with thousands of educators. 

Each lesson in the Common Sense curriculum takes on real challenges and digital dilemmas that students face today, giving them the skills they need to succeed as digital learners, leaders and citizens tomorrow. These ready-to-teach lessons, along with the online games, is a great way for any teacher or librarian to support digital citizenship all year long.

3.  Be Internet Awesome 

Be Internet Awesome — a collaboration between Google, the Net Safety Collaborative, and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition — teaches kids the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety so they can explore the online world with confidence. 

• The Be Internet Awesome curriculum focuses on five fundamental topics of digital citizenship:
• Share with Care: Digital Footprint and Responsible Communication Don’t Fall for Fake: Phishing, Scams and Credible Sources
• Secure Your Secrets: Online Security and Passwords
• It’s Cool to Be Kind: Combating Negative Online Behavior
• When in Doubt, Talk It Out: Questionable Content and Scenarios.

The lessons are reinforced through an online game called Interland, an adventure-packed online game that makes learning about digital citizenship and safety fun. 

4. Pear Deck + Be Internet Awesome 

Pear Deck is a great way to teach and support digital citizenship with interactive and collaborative lessons and activities. 

In fact, Pear Deck educators worked with Google to create custom, interactive presentations to accompany the Be Internet Awesome lessons. Designed for use in the classroom, each presentation provides teachers with a simple way to introduce a concept related to digital literacy and guide students through related activities. 

You will find the vocabulary flashcards for Pear Deck’s Flashcard Factory in the resources here too. 

5. Picture books supporting digital citizenship 

There are so many wonderful books that support and celebrate digital citizenship and online topics such as online safety, connecting, social media, technology use and more. 

In this Padlet, you will find picture books for digital citizenship and media literacy conversations and learning. Please feel free to add other books that tie into these topics to the Padlet, too. 

Shannon McClintock Miller is the district teacher librarian and director of innovation of instructional technology at Van Meter School in Iowa. She is the coauthor of the ISTE book Leading from the Library as well as an international speaker and consultant and Future Ready Librarians spokesperson.