Why is digital citizenship important?
Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It’s about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being internet savvy – using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same.
The basic skills we need to negotiate the world and contribute to its development have changed. As well as reading, writing and maths we also need to be media literate – to understand how to find, evaluate, manage and use information – our own as well as the zillions of pieces of information – some useful, some misleading – online. These basic skills apply as much to researching a homework paper as they do to having fun hanging out and talking to people in chat rooms or in Instant Messenger.
Additionally, we need to appreciate the positive impact and the contribution we can all make to the world – both online and off.