Key points:

• Helping students develop strong research skills will create responsible digital citizens
• Critical evaluation of online resources and information is essential
• See related article: Students need freedom to develop critical skills with edtech
• Get the latest news about digital learning by going to eSN’s Digital Learning page
• Stay up to date on the latest trends about learning in the digital age

Right now is the perfect time to start a research project with your students, as it will help them develop skills they will use for the rest of their lives. While your students, who have grown up in the Information Age and think they already know everything, any classroom teacher knows that our students need help more than they think.

As a school librarian for the past 11 years, my primary focus has been on helping students become adept navigators of the sea of information they live in. By the time students reach me in high school, they are already juggling multiple social media accounts and unknowingly driving many business and political decisions through their media consumption.

Our students’ belief that everything they need to know is online can, without the right skillset, leave them prey to misinformation. So how do we teach our students to steer through the online ocean of data to be both effective researchers and responsible digital citizens?

Here are 4 must-have resources for teaching high school students how to research:

Digital encyclopedias like Britannica School or Credo Reference are still important, and vetted, sources of basic information. Each provides students with a credible resource and gives them helpful notation and citation tools. But don’t settle for just one. Take students on a tour of both databases and explore the differences. Britannica School is user-friendly and comprehensive, which makes it an ideal tool for building student confidence in their research skills. Even if your students are literal social media influencers, they may be apprehensive or overwhelmed navigating a database, and we do not want them to give up and turn to Google. They need to develop their research skills before they are ready to evaluate content from across the world wide web. The bold, colorful text features and differentiation of reading levels make Britannica School engaging and easy to use, and it is a trusted source of information.

Although both databases offer similar content, Credo Reference has a unique feature called Visual Exploration that you and your students will love. The database will retrieve your search results in the form of a mind map, which links your search term to related terms that are hyperlinked to vetted content. Articles related to the original search term appear alongside the mind map. Visual Exploration is an effective and interactive tool for teaching students about choosing search terms and narrowing their research topics. Credo Reference also has a series of short research tip videos for students on topics such as “what to do when your topic is too broad.” 

Upper-level courses require students to navigate and analyze more complex sources than a standard encyclopedia entry, which can often be just a list of facts. Whether you are teaching U.S. Government or A.P. Language and Composition, your students are learning to evaluate persuasive writing and identify propaganda, because these are key information literacy skills. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints not only provides students with curated  sources and all the tools of an online encyclopedia but also introduces students to well-researched writing from various perspectives. A huge part of research is thinking critically about the credibility and intent of the source, and this database provides a safe space to analyze and examine issues from multiple angles. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints is both visually appealing and has a unique feature for visual learners. The Topic Finder retrieves results as your choice of a tile or a wheel that displays terms at various sizes depending on the number of results for that term. For example, a Topic Finder search for “Artificial intelligence” displays “mental health” among the largest clusters of the tile or section of the wheel, which lets me know I can find significant content in the database related to A.I. and mental health. There is a curriculum search and an Educator Resources page with helpful tip sheets and worksheets, including one for students to create their own concept map.

Before you dive into an encyclopedia head first, you may want to go to Discovery Education Experience and gather some tools for teaching research effectively. You do not need to build a lesson from scratch. There’s a wealth of media within the platform to help you activate prior knowledge, develop assignments and create interactive lessons on any topic. The Discover Data channel, which is the result of a partnership between the Nielsen Foundation, Discovery Education, and the National Afterschool Association, has interactive, relevant lessons that you can adapt for your students. One of my favorites is the “Social Media and Misinformation” presentation. You can use it as an introduction to information literacy or assign the presentation as a self-paced lesson for students. In fact, you can use the Build an Activity feature with this or another presentation from Discovery Education to create an assignment and share it directly to Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Schoology or Canvas.

With these essentials in your toolbox, you will be able to equip your students with research skills that will help them unlock success in and out of the classroom.

Related: 4 tools to help students build post-COVID research skills

Key points:

• Stay up to date on the latest trends about learning in the digital age

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Metropolitan Soundview High School had no art program when Cheriece White took a job there 10 years ago.

So she created her own.

The art and technology teacher initially designed a curriculum around digital storytelling and then transformed it into a multimedia art curriculum that included iMovie, storyboarding, illustration, children’s books, and front-end web design. The students gravitated to the web design part, wanting to know more about designing websites for their own business ideas. That prompted White to shift again, developing a curriculum on social media design and content creation.

“With how social media, graphic design, and technology are growing into every aspect of normal living, it is super important to have students practice these skills for their own benefit,” she said. “They are going to engage in social media and technology anyway, so why not teach them how to make money from it through design?”

White not only sees visual arts and graphic art as “great emotional outlets for kids this age to express themselves in a healthier and positive way.” She also wants her art course to provide a “tangible” way for them to become young entrepreneurs.

She wants her students to be college- and career-ready, as well as “small business ready.”

She’s hopeful that it’s working. Former students have gone on to create a cupcake company, a dog-walking business, a baseball clinic, and an Etsy digital download business. A group of current students who already have their own clothing brand recently told her how their social media following increased significantly after applying some techniques they learned in class.

White was the Bronx’s grand prize winner of the 2022 FLAG Award for Teaching Excellence, which honors educators who inspire creativity and passion. For winning the prestigious award, White’s school received $10,000, which she used to buy easels, paint, brushes, canvases, pallets, and markers for her monthly “paint and snack sessions” with students. She ordered some technology, including software licenses and Apple Pencils for drawing digital illustrations.

She also received $25,000 in unrestricted funds. White, who had a baby shortly after winning the award, used some of the prize money to invest in her son’s 529 college savings account and also plans to use some of it to further her own education in the growing field that she’s trailblazing.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

My little brother, 12 at the time, is the one that changed my career path [from media marketing] to what it is today. He asked me why I looked so sad. I told him all I wanted to do was graphic art and prove how important it was to learn these skills with how the use of computers was growing. But it was 2009, companies were closing, and there were no jobs. He said then why don’t you become an art teacher?

I explained that the type of art that I wanted to teach was not offered. He said, at 12, “Well, why don’t you become the teacher you never had and create the type of art you want to teach? Prove them wrong and show them the world needs your art.” I went back to school, received my master’s in K-12 art education, and started my hunt for a school that believed in my vision and would give me a chance to execute the curriculum that I wanted to build.

How do you fuse art and technology, and why? Why do you think these skills are so important for students to learn right now?

In my class, it’s important to introduce the foundations of visual arts, like elements of design, principles of design, and color theory, with graphic design platforms that lead to content creation to launch small businesses. Students are extremely engaged with social media but don’t know how powerful of a tool it can be if used to represent a brand or service.

While learning about color theory, students learn about color psychology and how that affects marketing design. While learning composition and layout, they are practicing their mathematic skills by measuring margins, bleeds, and pixel-to-inches conversions. While designing a logo, students also practice project-based learning and design thinking. The combinations are endless, and the result is a student that is well-rounded in all aspects of visual art, technology, and marketing design.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite project-based lesson that I love to teach is logo design and branding. Students find a way to impress me by creating these beautiful logos that would match their target audience. Seeing all these beautiful portfolios come together for different businesses that they can actually do in real life just warms my heart.

I also recently coupled with a STEM teacher to make a STEAM unit and do a Shark Tank lesson together. This is a lot of fun because the students then take all of their designs from my art class and their inventions from their STEM class and start to pitch judges, like our principals and guidance counselors. The students take the challenge head-on and produce amazing interactive slide decks. This year, the winners will receive an iPad.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom or your school?

I teach in a very low-income area, and many students definitely have the burden of that on their shoulders. When it comes to having the correct finances for things for school or school trips, some students just can’t participate because they don’t have the funds. Also, there is a lot of violence outside of our walls that we like to shield them from or show them that there’s a better outlet to release your anger or stress.

Some students have to work jobs in order to provide for their families, and certain students still may be in shelters but are embarrassed to let us know that they may need some help. And some students may not have enough money for their next meal, so they stay after school so they can have the free lunch and after-school lunch for dinner. This truly breaks my heart and is one of the main motivators in why I started my curriculum: To show them that they could start a business without any money and pull themselves out of a situation as long as they have the skills necessary to do so.

Tell us briefly about the cheerleading squad you helped found and how they got to go to Nationals.

I and two other coaches started the first-ever cheerleading team at James Monroe Campus. We called ourselves the James Monroe Eagles. This was by far the proudest moment in my career as an educator. Our team was spectacular and won first place in our division at regionals. This won us a bid to go to Nationals at Disney World in Orlando.

However, the cost to participate was way too much for our kids’ families. So I put together a video of our kids asking for help to go, made a GoFundMe for them, and within 72 hours, we raised over $30,000! New York City news outlets came to wish us luck, and we invited the community to wish us farewell and good luck. Some students had never been on a plane before, let alone to Walt Disney World. To see the kids be in shock looking at a palm tree or feeling the warmth in February in a tropical climate brought tears to all of our eyes. We won seventh in the nation, but that whole experience made all of us feel like we were in the first place.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Key points:

• Stay up to date on the latest trends about learning in the digital age

After decades of working with educational technology, I’ve come to the realization that technology will have its greatest impact in the classroom when educators allow learners to use digital technology as a self-directed learning tool. This means not just providing students with laptops and online resources, but ensuring they have the necessary skills to find, validate, apply, and curate the vast amount of information now available to them.

More importantly, they must be given control of when and how these digital tools are used. Think about how adults use their smartphones; they use them whenever they need to. No one is dictating when they can use it, how they can use it, or where they can use it–why don’t we allow learners to do the same?

Imagine a classroom where students have unfettered access to digital tools and resources whenever needed. That would be a very different classroom than the ones I’ve experienced, but one that would be able to support the digital learners in our classrooms today.

This realization is based on years of implementing various educational technology initiatives, and the recognition of the similarity between the impact mechanical technology had on the Industrial Age and how digital technology has impacted the Information Age. When mechanized technology was introduced, it was primarily used to replace repetitive and rote physical tasks. It took a while for people to be comfortable with mechanized automation, but once they were, it created growth and advances in manufacturing that were previously unattainable.

Similarly, today’s digital tools can be used to replace repetitive and rote mental tasks. In other words, digital technology has automated memorization.  In a typical classroom, students learn content through processes that rely heavily on a variety of rote and repetitive activities. These activities not only help students learn the content, but also allow them to develop memorization skills.

Traditional learning emphasizes knowledge retention and the skill of memorization. But the technology of today can be used as a tool to unburden the learner’s mind from rote tasks like memorization. From a learning perspective, the automation of memorization will empower today’s students to use information to develop learning skills such as analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and creating instead of just memorizing information. These skills will not only prepare students to learn and work in the Information Age, but will give them access to more knowledge than through traditional instruction

Teachers can use the automation of memorization to help shift the focus of instruction from knowledge retention to knowledge application. This shift will expand the development of the learner’s higher-order learning skills.  Instruction that is problem- or project-based, learner -entered, and emphasizes higher-order skill development over content retention is what today’s students need. This type of instruction will give learners experiences that will emphasize knowledge construction, identifying and solving problems, and being creative and collaborative.

Fortunately, the learner-centered instructional strategies needed to support these changes are not new to teachers. As student proficiency in these new digital skills grows, lessons can become more problem/project-based to allow students to take advantage of their newly-learned skills. The time that was spent delivering content can now be allocated to completing projects that develop and strengthen higher-order learning skills. A shift to learning by doing, not memorization, will better prepare learners for the information-rich world they live in.

Giving students the power to access digital tools on demand will require a shift in how teachers design instruction. This will impact curricular decisions, assessment design, and the selection of resources. For centuries, success at school has been defined by students learning their facts, but now that students have unfettered access to information and resources, educators need to reconsider what learning means. Because memorization has been automated, memorizing should be de-emphasized so that students can focus on the higher-order skills needed to navigate the Information Age.

Recent public opinion polls have shown that the spread of misinformation is a growing concern for many.  Given that many social media sites influence what information users see, it is not surprising that the public is concerned about misinformation. Without an understanding of how to manage and question information presented to them, users could be more likely to blindly accept it without question.  Students need skills to validate information presented to them, to find other relevant information, and to apply the information to ensure they are getting all of the facts.

Teaching learners these skills while they are in school will provide a means for addressing the information overload they will experience as adults. Then, they can leverage their growing access to information to open doors to new ideas and different perspectives instead of unquestionably accepting the information forced upon them.

Public Affairs and Media Research. (2022, October 13). Many believe misinformation is increasing extreme political views and behaviors. AP-NORC. https://apnorc.org/projects/many-believe-misinformation-is-increasing-extreme-political-views-and-behaviors/

ISTE standards: Students. ISTE. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-students

Higher order thinking: Bloom’s taxonomy. Learning Center. (2022, June 6). Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/higher-order-thinking/

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In recent days, Ukrainian officials have expressed urgent concern that “Russia is planning to launch massive cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.” Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a dizzying series of cybersecurity threats and incidences that have plagued the global community for what seems like forever. Every day our country is fighting a seemingly invisible war against cybercriminals, and our students—the most vulnerable among us—are suffering the most.

According to the FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report, more than 14,000 victims of cybercrime that year were under the age of 20, with losses totaling $100 million. Of these victims, about six children per day faced online exploitation or abuse. And these are only the crimes that have been reported to the FBI—about 80% of cybercrime goes unreported every year.

That’s why it’s becoming increasingly more urgent for us to protect our students from the constant threats they face online. Teaching them how to navigate these threats must include four vital strategies:

Think Before You Click

Most of us teach our little kids not to talk to strangers. But many of us fail to adequately extend this lesson to the cyberworld, which is especially concerning considering that phishing attacks were the top reported cybercrime in 2021, making up 41% of all reports.

Urge your kids to be cyber-vigilant and to avoid clicking links from people or organizations they don’t recognize or downloading unsolicited attachments from people they don’t know or trust. And if something suspicious appears to come from someone they do trust—always double-check the sender’s email address or username for misspellings. It’s also important to scan the message for suspicious language to determine if it was written by someone else, and hover your mouse over any hyperlinks (no clicking!) to preview the destination address and ensure it’s a trusted website.

Be Wary of Oversharing

Students must be reminded to keep some things private. Period. Detailing every single moment of their lives—for example, when they’re away on vacation, what their daily schedule is like, or tagging their location while they’re still there—can give invisible strangers a prime opportunity to attack, potentially putting your student in a physically dangerous situation.

Related:
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In addition to explaining the dangers of oversharing, students should also be reminded that the privacy settings on their social media accounts exist for a reason. Explain to them the importance of being selective about whom they accept as a “friend” online.

Update Before It’s Too Late

We’ve all done it at least once: while you’re in the middle of a task, your computer or device tells you it’s time to update the software and instead you click ‘postpone’ (and keep postponing until you’re good and ready). In fact, nearly a third of people don’t perform software updates when they should or at all. However, keeping the security software, web browser, and operating system on your student’s devices up-to-date is one of the best defenses against online threats. Be sure to remind your student to follow their software update notifications and to immediately install updates when prompted.

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Devices Closer

This seems like a simple thing to do, but forgetfulness breeds vulnerability. Teach your student to keep their laptop and devices close and to put them in a safe, secure place when they’re not being used. Of course, never leave a device unattended outside or in a public place. And most importantly, with more than 80% of cyberattacks caused by leveraging weak or insecure passwords, students should be sure to protect their devices with long, unique passwords that are very hard to guess so that any lost or stolen devices can’t be accessed.

Despite all these precautions, students—especially younger children—may not immediately recognize the dangers of visiting unknown websites or communicating with strangers online. However, ongoing reminders and communication are always the best tools we have to protect our students from the threats they can and can’t yet see.

As an educator with 21 years of experience in teaching and learning, I have had the opportunity to work with students of differing abilities and learning backgrounds. During a typical school year, meeting the varied needs of my students makes for an extremely rewarding, but challenging job. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the needs of students tenfold, maximizing both the rewards and challenges of my role as an educator. 

As the world begins to shift in the evolving post-pandemic environment, it’s clear that much has changed. In my opinion, K-12 education has seen tremendous changes whose impacts we will be assessing and addressing for years to come. 

However, as educators begin to consider how to evolve education to meet the needs of our students today and in the future, we have before us the enormous task of shoring up students’ academic skills that may have eroded during the “emergency teaching” era.

As a Language Arts teacher, I’ve found that one of the skills my students need to improve is their basic research skills. Student media literacy, citing their sources, and communicating their results are all critical research skills my students need to brush up on.

The good news is that there are a host of edtech resources to support this. Here are some of the resources my colleagues and I are using to support students as they improve their research skills in a changing education landscape: 

Edpuzzle is an excellent resource that helps students learn the basics of almost any topic. I find this program to be helpful because I can assign a group of students via Google Classroom videos to watch and take notes on. If I want, I can even include an assessment to see if students are absorbing the information within the lessons. One excellent features of this resource is that I can take videos and adapt them by embedding my own questions or audio. Then, once I assign the content, I can see who watched the video. In addition, students can re-watch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, which allows them to learn information they might have missed. 

Wonderopolis is another fantastic website that lets students explore things they are interested in. In their research, students are always asking questions. With Wonderoplis, students can search a bank of over 130,000 questions in over 2,800 topics. This content is aligned to  Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the STEM Educational Quality Framework, and Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Students can also put in their own questions that will be added to the Wonderopolis wonder bank, which helps them learn how knowledge is built and accumulated. 

Discovery Education is a K-12 multi-disciplinary platform containing over 200,000 digital assets including videos, podcasts, reading passages, interactives and more. Discovery Education is a wonderful tool because its resources have not only been vetted by educational professionals but are also aligned to state standards. While teachers can also use this website to assign different videos or channels for students to use in their research, the Discovery Education platform also includes the Studio tool which is a perfect resource with which students can present their findings. Finally, Discovery Education resources include citations, which help students in preparing their Work Cited pages. 

In New Hampshire, Discovery Education’s resources are provided at no cost to school systems through our Department of Education. Discovery Education has similar arrangements in several other states, so be sure to check with your school administrators on availability in your district. 

Citefast and CiteThisForMe  are two citation creation websites that help students create their bibliography or works cited pages. Each of them contains multiple citation formats, such as MLA, APA, Harvard, and Chicago. They provide style guides, as well as FAQ sections to aid in citations. CiteThisForMe also contains information about the credibility of sources, which can be a great help to both students and teachers. 

Using these resources and others, my students have improved their overall research skills, but also the breadth and authenticity of their research. These resources have also improved their “4 C” skills—Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity.  

During the height of pandemic-fueled school closures, it was the 4C skills that helped educators find the work arounds that allowed us to maintain students’ continuity of learning. I believe that if we find tools that help students brush up on “hard” skills like research while helping build “soft” skills, we should take advantage of those resources and find even more ways to integrate them into instruction. 

Today’s students don’t know the world without the internet. They spend days and nights on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat but hardly know how to translate all this information into learning. Gen Z doesn’t necessarily think critically about what they find online.

As educators, we can teach the academic side of the internet to them.

Why is it so critical?

• Online research skills and critical writing are among must-haves for students’ progress through college life and future career.
• Studies show that young people don’t focus on the credibility of sources they use; they can’t explain why they choose certain websites, authors, and publications.
• Surveys demonstrate that many students don’t understand how to use online sources to support their arguments.

Educators can help students evaluate online information efficiently. Its volume keeps growing, and it’s significant for young people to know how to separate the gems from the garbage and become critical writers and consumers, not just viewers.

So, how can we help youngsters do efficient online research and navigate information easily?

1. Critical evaluation
   Let’s explain the dimensions of critical evaluation to our students. When researching a website, they should keep in mind its relevance, reliability, and accuracy.

• To examine relevance and accuracy, a student should consider the quality of the content.
• To examine the reliability, a student should consider the authors and their agenda.

Encourage students to forget about Wikipedia as a one-stop website for academic research. Teach them to consider and compare several sources. It might be challenging, but websites such as Teaching Channel or Read Write Think can help.

2. Effective judgment
   Students follow the purpose of their project to understand what websites would fit it best. Content published by governments, universities, and credible media outlets is of higher quality for them to consider. Depending on the purpose, teach students to consider resources that:

• are valuable for deeper research on language and literature;
• allow finding reliable information on STEM disciplines;
• help with writing essays on general topics.

Introduce cross-checking information to students and encourage them to explore several pieces for proving the accuracy and reliability of the reference.

The problem is that some students believe all online resources are of the same quality: They type a keyword into Google and use the info they see from the first result only. Though Google remains the #1 go-to source, students should understand that its top results sometimes don’t offer enough depth they need.

Please teach strategic search to students and provide them with several newspaper websites that have searchable archives. Kentucky Virtual Library and Google Scholar might be a good start.

3. Effective usage
   Teach students to determine the difference between news, personal, professional, and commercial websites. Explain that the .edu, .gov, and .org domains are more reliable to use for academic purposes, as they commonly provide users with accurate and relevant content.

Introduce students to scholarly search engines (Ebsco, LexisNexis) and “Advanced Search” by Google. They encourage deeper research, allowing to find credible information and scholarly papers that are more accurate to refer to on particular topics.

Also, you might want to share some checklists with students to help them with efficient online academic research. Ask them to answer the following questions each time they evaluate a website and doubt if they can use it as a reference:

• Is it relevant to my purpose?
• Who is the author of this information?
• Is this person (institution) credible enough?
• Is the information on this website updated regularly?
• Where and how can I check the accuracy of this information?
• How can I connect the information to my purpose, questions, and interpretations?

Share a guide to online research with your students and propose some top resources on finding relevant data:

• Academic Index
• Project Muse
• World Cat

More resources, as well as tips on efficient research, are here.

Despite their digital literacy, it might be tricky for students to interpret all online information into learning, especially when it comes to critical research, including relevance, accuracy, and reliability of that info. Lessons encouraging students’ evaluation skills will allow teachers to exercise academic research and help youngsters become better web consumers.

When the pandemic prompted schools to quickly shift to distance learning last spring, educators became responsible for using online technologies to teach students. This was the first time that many educators had to grapple not only with virtual classroom management, but with helping their students learn the ins and outs of staying safe online. This included a crash course in learning and behaving online.

This set of “online manners” is referred to as digital citizenship, which is how we should behave when using digital tools, interacting with others online, and becoming better stewards of technology.

As a leader of a nonprofit where young kids connect and learn online, we prioritize teaching kids these important skills that will take them well into adulthood. 

Students need to be taught things like:

• Behaving appropriately when online, i.e., encouraging students to use THINK: 
  • Is it Truthful? 
  • Is it Helpful? 
  • Is it Inspiring? 
  • Is it Necessary? 
  • Is it Kind?
• Learning to protect their private information online.
• Being respectful of themselves and others.
• Saying “no” to disruptive or bullying behavior, and encouraging others to do the same and be respectful.
• Negotiating conflict with others, for example, in online games or while collaborating on a project.
• Recognizing the benefits of teamwork when partnering in a virtual space.
• Becoming effective communicators by sharing messages and ideas using global chat and voice chat tools like Discord can increase confidence and self-esteem.
• Sharing their mistakes and persistence with others. Doing so will help them see failure as both an opportunity to learn (“Well, that didn’t work!”) and as a chance to save others from a similar fate.

Practicing good digital citizenship should include a pathway of communication and online community rules to build a safe place for everyone involved. On our free Kids Club Minecraft server, we have fluid rules to allow kids to learn and grow without fearing punishment for making mistakes. While we occasionally have to ban a child for 24 hours for inappropriate behavior, this usually only happens with more extreme cases when a child breaks the rules repeatedly and with malicious intent. In those cases, we are also in conversation with the child’s caregiver and provide additional tips for helping the child re-enter the community. We see it more as a learning opportunity to teach young people to make good choices and be respectable online citizens.

School librarians can also assist with teaching digital citizenship. In teaching early literacy, librarians may encourage caregivers to talk through work-specific tasks with their children and explain the uses for a device. They can discuss the importance of copyright protection and incorporate technology-related books into their storytimes. 

There are several resources online that teach children digital citizenship. Common Sense Media, for example, provides free digital citizenship courses for grades K-12. There are also digital citizen apps, such as Easy Tech by Learning.com, that aim to teach kids basic uses, best practices, and safety risks online, or a unit by BrainPOP that instructs kids on online best practices through fun activities, quizzes, and games. Cyberwise also offers a free digital course for parents and educators, as well as resources and articles. 

The resources are out there, and the demand is increasing as we become more connected. Our youth need to be supported by schools, parents, and peers to develop the necessary skills to survive and thrive online. It’s up to us all to work together to prepare our children for the digital world.