Comprehensive Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Taito Learning
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After working with thousands of children over the past few years, it has become very evident that while kids know how to use some technology like their phones and video game controllers, they don’t know how to safely and knowledgeably navigate technology – especially when it comes to computers and digital connections.
Taito Learning has a great digital citizenship curriculum for K-5 students which helps both teachers and kids navigate the online world smartly and safely.
You may be familiar with the Typetastic typing program that Taito Learning also offers. Their Digital Citizenship is just as good and is broken down into curriculum with 24+ lessons for K-2nd and 3rd-5th. It really breaks into our digital space in an area both kids and teachers need most.
Lessons focus on a great combination of digital literacy, digital citizenship, and computer science. Their curriculum goes far beyond just understanding what a URL is…..
Just like Typetastic, Taito Learning’s Digital Citizenship curriculum requires no additional plugins, downloads or extensions making it ideal to use in the classroom at at home! The curriculum has cool interactive videos (great for coordination skills using a mouse!), a storyline, games and quizzes to engage students in learning.
What is Digital Citizenship and Why it Matters
While Digital Citizenship has been around for many years, it has become a “buzz word” in the world of education recently – and for good reason! Essentially it is understanding and being responsible with online safety, communication and digital literacy skills. This can cover everything from cyberbullying, privacy concerns, fake news, internet connections and more.
With the use of AI becoming the forerunner in our news and digital experience today, the importance of teaching students to not only engage responsibly online but also how to decipher truth and security is so important.
Taito’s Digital Citizenship Curriculum Overview
Let’s Peek into the Digital Citizenship Curriculum!
Above you can see a glimpse of both the student dashboard and the teacher dashboard in the School Version. It’s very simple and intuitive to use on both sides. Teachers can create classroom pods, manually add or import students, assign lessons to specific students, and track progress in their dashboard.
If the student clicks off of the page to try and do something else, the program will immediately stop the student’s progress. They also cannot be sneaky and skip ahead either.
Some of the lessons learned will cover:
- Online Safety – personal protection, cyber threats
- Ethical Behavior – responsible online interactions and digital footprints
- Media Literacy – critical evaluation skills in identifying misinformation online
- Cyberbullying Prevention – recognizing, preventing and responding to digital harrassment
- Copyright – legal implications for using online content
- Security – secured vs unsecured wifi and cellular networks, etc.
How the Digital Citizenship Curriculum Prepares Students for the Future
With so many distractions available to kids (and adults!) today in the world of technology, encouraging critical thinking skills in digital spaces is more vital than ever!
Digital citizenship teaches students to become both responsible content creators AND consumers! It helps kids balance their screen time usage with their well-being. Both of which seem to be more difficult for everyone than it used to be!
The curriculum takes a proactive approach encouraging students to engage in healthy safe digital behavior and even provides printable certificates of completion!
Digital Citizenship Curriculum Teacher Dashboard:
Above is a glimpse into the teacher dashboard looking at a student’s progress. You can see that the lesson is displayed along with the progress, time student spent on the lesson, date and timestamp of completion, and how many attempts the student needed to complete the lesson.
Teachers can import students via CSV, manually, or through Google Classroom. This makes onboarding your students much quicker!
Overall – I am impressed with the extensive coverage of content that kids should know about but probably don’t! You would be surprised how much kids don’t know about online safety and security! This digital citizenship curriculum is a fantastic and easy addition into any classroom that I think all kids should have access to.
