Blog #5: Important Digital Topics

As a prospective teacher, what are two basic essential digital topics that are important to you and for your students to learn? and why?

While multiple topics are essential for teaching our students about navigating the digital space, I believe that emphasizing inappropriate content and online privacy is of utmost importance in our classroom instruction. I anticipate that in my future experience as an educator, I will encounter students who are digital natives, meaning they have been born in a generation where information is readily available to them through technology and media.

As a digital native myself, I am not oblivious to the fact that most of the time, we take advantage of how easy our access is to share, read, watch, and listen to information that is deemed inappropriate. We sometimes forget that technology should be used to educate and improve our quality of life, rather than to spread harmful content. Students should be taught the algorithm behind the flow of the kind of content we see, which also determines how frequently we want to see it in our feeds. By showing them how to control their settings on their social media and taking the time to choose the content that frequently appears on their feed by clicking the sometimes-ignored ellipsis on the upper right of our screen and hitting "See less," we guide our students to see information that educates, encourages, and increases their capacity to live a good life.

Aside from educating students about inappropriate content, it is also empirical that we emphasize to our students that it is not ideal to make themselves public on the internet, as any information they make available on the internet decreases their likelihood of being safe inside and outside the digital space. As an educator and someone who has received training about online privacy and digital citizenship, I can demonstrate to my students how they can again control their settings so that they only share information that is deemed appropriate to share and the benefits that are tied to this habit. Also, I can share real-life examples and reports where individuals' data and privacy have been breached, leading to some unwanted loss and disaster. It is important that students are informed about the dark side of the internet and that it is not entirely safe; hence, they should show more caution in their actions while using it.

By educating my students about inappropriate content and online privacy, we empower them to be agents rather than objects controlled by the internet.