Global Digital Citizenship: Providing Context

This paper provides details of the redesign of a digital citizenship unit for pre-service teachers to better support their future students in gaining an understanding of the importance of teaching global digital citizenship. The purpose of the unit design was to broaden these future teachers’ understandings of the complexity of being effective global digital citizens by embedding the subtopics of digital citizenship; equitable access, global awareness, cultural understanding, and safe, healthy, legal, ethical, and responsible uses of technology into the foundations of modeling and integrating technology into the curriculum. To help them learn these complex issues so they could make more critical curriculum decisions in their future classrooms, teacher candidates engaged in a collaborative jigsaw activity, a debate, and were assessed by posting their perspectives in their personal blogs. These teacher candidates demonstrated their growth on this complex, but vital, issue by providing contextual examples.