Digital Citizenship

Hello, everyone. My name is Juliana Gomez, and I'm a master of arts and elementary education and multiple subject credential student from San Francisco state university. Today we will be discussing digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is the most effective Internet safety practice for online users. Digital citizenship is an umbrella term that is comparable to a citizenship of a country. Because just like we have rights and responsibilities to our country, we also have rights and responsibilities to our digital world. And this is very important in order to practice appropriate online activity. There are three prominent branches of digital citizenship. These branches include digital literacy, information literacy, and media literacy. Today we will be focusing on media literacy. Media literacy refers to a set of skills that allows people to analyze content of media messages they see or send. This is very important for elementary students because children learn from the media they see here or read on a daily basis. In fact, on average, kindergarteners see about 70 media messages a day, which highly affects the way that they live. For those reasons, it is a very important that we think critically and ask questions like who created this message. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention. How might different people understand this message differently from me? What lifestyles values and points of view are represented in or omitted from this message? And lastly, why is this message being sent? It is very important that we advocate for media literacy education and that we practice a safe online use every single day.