Digital Citizenship/Online Safety
What Is Digital Citizenship
Digital citizenship is the capability to use the internet efficiently. The internet gives people the capability to use it for both good reasons and bad reasons. The positive part about the internet is that people can use it to socialize with friends and to improve learning skills. For example, according to Digital Citizenship: What It Means, How to Teach It, and the Resources You Need, by Brooke McGuire, “Classes involving research and writing should include evaluating a website’s credibility and writing proper citations. Any time students need to search the internet, direct and explicit instruction on the credibility and reliability of information, as well as research tips, are helpful to steer students toward useful information while disregarding inaccurate or unnecessary information.” The internet is useful for anybody who needs to find information on different subjects.
Even though there are good ways and affects to use the internet, there are things that people use the internet for negative reasons. The internet causes addiction for people to experience, cyber-bullying happens around the internet, and most people aren’t careful or mindful about the dangers that happen in the internet. For example, according to Digital Citizenship: What It Means, How to Teach It, and the Resources You Need, by Brooke McGuire, “Digital citizenship skills are essential to ensure students’ safety and protection. While kids today may have no problem navigating the web, they’re less likely to know how to vet sources, understand the sensitivity of the information they’re sharing and take in the gravity of conversations they’re having online.” Most people, including kids, should understand the things that they don’t know about the internet.
How To Be A Good Digital Citizen
There are ways that people can become good digital citizens. Follow the suggested options to be a good digital citizen:
- Keep your information private from people who try to scam/click-bait you into sharing your information to them
- Prevent yourself from sending mean comments to other people in the internet, which is considered cyber-bullying
- Learn how the internet works and how to perform it for various uses
- Look out for information that is inaccurate
Ways To Be Safe In The Internet/Online Safety
The internet has a lot of things people should be careful about. Things like hackers, cyber-bullying, harmful websites, scams, etc. One way to be safe in the internet would be looking out for unknown websites from scammers. For example, according to Online Safety, by Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph, “People don’t always make good decisions or think straight when they’re stressed out or upset. If you have to, call someone or go for a run instead before you start venting online. When you’re on a website, try to remain as anonymous as possible. That means keeping all private information private.” It’s a good idea to watch out from showing your true-identity to others.
Work Cited:
https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/internet-safety.html
https://www.aeseducation.com/career-readiness/what-is-digital-citizenship
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