Cellphone-friendly-ish: Digital Citizenship for Realists

229. 164. 294. 488. 589. These are the number of notifications that were received in my classes on a random Tuesday at the end of our Digital Citizenship unit last month. My co-teacher Laura had read about a teacher having students tally their notifications, so we decided to end our unit with this activity, coupled with viewing The Social Dilemma (Share My Lesson has a webinar about it here). To read about another teacher with the same experiment, you can check it out here. You’ll notice a few things. First, this is an old story, so we are just late to the game, but the idea has resurfaced on social media (yes, I see the irony). The one difference in our experiment is that I did not tell students to keep their volume up. I’m just not that brave. 

A few years ago when I was writing Movie Magic: Ready-to-Use Guide for teaching SEL, I was watching “older” movies to balance out the animated movies I had included. When I came across The Social Dilemma, I had that aha feeling I’ve described in the past—the excitement that hits me when I am watching a movie that I know I MUST TEACH! (Movies are one of my passions. You can read about some of my all-time favorites: Social Justice in Education: Teaching Zootopia and Teaching Disney’s Cruella: An Identity Study). A line from The Social Dilemma stuck with me. To paraphrase: “If you aren’t paying for it, you are the product.” Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat. X (formerly known as Twitter). The list goes on. This line is the reason I chose to do a Digital Citizenship unit. 

I’m a huge proponent of creating my own resources, but once I found “Everything You Need to Teach Digital Citizenship” from Common Sense Education, I knew that it had done the work for me. I didn’t want to harp on kiddos or sound like an old lady, but I wanted them to understand how their data, identity and future consumerism were being mined and sold. When you put it that way, it sounds too sinister for anyone to listen, but Common Sense Education’s videos were both honest and nonjudgmental. This video, “Teen Voices: The Pressure to Stay Connected,” hit the right note for me and my students as I watched them nod in agreement. I used the eighth-grade Digital Citizenship lesson plans, which included the slideshow and videos, as well as handouts and interactive quizzes. I was thrilled to see that Common Sense Education is a Share My Lesson Partner, and they did an amazing webinar last month called AI Literacy: Preparing Students for Digital Spaces. And Share My Lesson recently launched a new community about artificial intelligence and education here.

All classrooms will be different, and any unit on digital citizenship will depend on grade level, school culture, family support and the community you have created. Here are the lessons that we learned from our unit:

Turn Your Notifications Off

Even though I ended our unit with this activity, I’d highly recommend using this stunt (and it definitely feels like a stunt when I told my students to take out their cellphones and turn all of their notifications on) to start the unit. If you are brave enough, you could ask them to leave their volume up. My students enjoyed keeping an individual tally sheet, and then we compiled their totals into a class tally sheet. The data is disturbing, and thought-provoking. There were several key takeaways. Students needed to turn off their Google Classroom notifications (video here) because they were receiving dozens of emails from teachers who were putting in assignments, etc. The inundation of email simply caused them to stop looking at email at all. Parents also texted their children during class assuming, I hope, that students had turned off their notifications and would receive them later. Not surprisingly, TikTok and Snapchat sent the most notifications, and this aligned with the apps they used the most. As I implored them, “Please, please turn off your notifications. Snapchat will still be there when the class is over. You don’t need to be interrupted in double digits every class.” Many students talked about “DND” (do not disturb), and I think this activity, due to its novelty, really stuck. 

Fight Addictive Design

My students seemed relieved to learn that apps were made by people who understand the psychology of addictive design, which is basically using your human instincts against you to make you keep scrolling, check an app or interact constantly. I think they felt they were failures in some ways for always being on their phones, but this conversation turned out to be empowering. One feature that students mentioned over and over was the autoplay of recommendations for videos. Ultimately, videos are curated based on your previous choices, personalizing an algorithm designed to keep you on your device. Students talked about the impact of short form content too—there is always time for one more video when they are so short. Hours pass, and there they are. I’ll be honest, as an adult in this situation, I felt pretty guilty about my own children’s social media use when I realized that it was 100 percent designed to addict them and then mine their identity. 

Protect Your Privacy

This was probably the most interesting conversation we had. Students were under the impression they didn’t have anything to protect when it came to privacy—like credit card numbers or bank accounts. They thought, probably rightfully so, that adults only meant “stranger danger” when they talked about privacy. I did spend a little time on their online safety, but I think they hear that a bunch. What they didn’t understand is that your “Snap Map” and location sharing are extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. We talked about the vulnerability students project online when they post personal details like “fighting with parents” or “retail therapy” with a check-in at the mall. They have now alerted bad actors to their emotional state and location, which is a horrible idea. 

My Digital Citizenship unit was only two weeks long, and so we just scratched the surface. I’ve decided to do this unit in November next year because I want to spend longer on it, but I don’t think we’d have the relationships in September or October to have frank and honest conversations like we did this year in March. If you are interested in the Social Dilemma unit from my book Movie Magic, Routledge Eye on Education is offering it for free here. You can use code AEV24 through the end of June for 20 percent off on the full book.