Learning & Leading Through Technology

KN OW T HE IS TES TAN DA RD S

In each Know the ISTE Standards, an ISTE research associate describes a lesson from a classroom observation and evaluates its alignment with the ISTE Standards for Students ( iste.org/standards/ standards-for-students).

By Talbot Bielefeldt

Standard 5: Digital Citizenship

ACTIVITY 1: No evidence of the standard

Assigned to research causes of the American Civil War, seventh graders primarily use Wikipedia.com. Others draw on revisionist and anti-revisionist websites. One student quotes a personal email from a partisan blogger. Each student returns to class with strong opinions that are difficult to document because of a lack of citations.

I N D I C AT O R S

T he American Civil War continues to be a sensitive topic in the United States, with different official interpretations of what the war was about and its meaning for present-day political and social life. Middle schoolers often study the war in a U.S. history class and use it as a jumping-off point for discussing social issues. The three possible class activities described in the table below show how a unit on the Civil War can address digital citizenship—a very modern social issue—to varying degrees.

Using a search engine to pursue the assign-
ment in the first activity brings up a variety of
links to sites arguing about the role of slavery as
a cause of the war. (Note that revisionist refers to
the official position of some states that the war
was about states’ rights.) The results they turn up
show that this is one of those topics, like evolution
or the World War II holocaust, for which naïve
researchers need to pay close attention to infor-
mation sources and biases. The first activity rep-
resents a poorly controlled assignment likely to
result in misuse of information or even exposure
of students to risk. ISTE did not actually elicit a
personal email in this case, but partisan websites
often include information request forms that can
result in unwanted follow-ups.

The subsequent activities increase the emphasis on digital citizenship in two ways. First, the assignments have requirements for citing sources, and second, they build in student interaction around the information. The last example has the most explicit demands for information diversity, as well as a cooperative-learning structure for shared accountability. Teams have to police their own members in order to pass.