Reflection:

Digital Citizenship and Responsibility Collaborative Unit

Karmen Lowery

FRIT 7739: Instructional Technology Practicum

Dr. E. Downs

Fall 2022
 Overall I am pleased with the results of this digital citizenship and responsibility unit.

The majority of students achieved a mastery level for each lesson and felt confident in applying

their newly learned skills. I believe that all learners, no matter what grade level or how old they

are, can benefit from any digital literacy, media fluency, and/or online safety courses.

Collaborating with another teacher, that is one of the primary teachers for a group of students,

provides more insight to the student relationships both in and out of the classroom. Mrs. Johnson

and I were able to discuss several student comments to understand where they were coming from

as well as guide them in the right direction.

Throughout the implementation of the unit, I ran into a couple of issues and realized

several design flaws within my online unit. The first main issue that we ran into was that Google

Sites was not allowed or enabled for our school which meant students were not able to access the

online unit. However, we were able to ask the administrator to grant permission for 6th grade

students to access Google Sites and it was taken care of the next day. In the meantime, I was able

to use my board to display the introduction lesson and video to the whole class and have students

complete the initial activities. Another issue I ran into was remembering to change the setting to

not collect email addresses on my Google Form. The students thought that they were being

tricked into typing in their email addresses and were hesitant to go on with that activity. I guess

that’s mostly a good thing though and I was able to turn that into a teachable moment. In

addition to the functionality issues, there were some design flaws. The first one that stood out to

me right away were the navigation buttons at the bottom of each page. Initially, I filled in the

background of the section and left the buttons white. I learned that students are used to buttons

being filled in with a color and the background to be left white. After the first day, I immediately

made the change to the online unit. The next design flaw that caused confusion was in the
Quizizz wrap-up activity. I did not change the question type from multiple choice to a checkbox

to accommodate for various answers instead of a specific answer, which caused everyone’s

answer to be wrong. Again a quick fix, but confusion and chaos at the moment.

I am thankful that I was able to implement this online unit in a classroom face-to-face

with students. Although it could have been completed as an asynchronous unit, I think it was

more enjoyable and more effective to go through navigating an online unit together. Many

students needed help with where to go next and what to turn in, although it seemed clearly

labeled to me. I found that our group discussions allowed students to verbalize and talk through

their thoughts and ideas instead of having to type it all on some digital tool. I thought that

duplicating the tools to complete the lessons would get boring for students, but it actually made it

more consistent and manageable for students, allowing them to focus on the content instead of

learning how to use a new tool.