Digital Citizenship Week and Kids

It is Digital Citizenship Week.  At Bennett Day, we use technology as a tool to document our student digital portfolios and to understand how things work.  We use technology to build, break, dissect, explore, document, and reflect.  We use technology, not to isolate, but instead to facilitate collaboration and human interaction as we foster social emotional skills.  Our students and teachers work together to experience, code, and apply.  And by code, we mean learning an applicable language, environment, or methodology, be it how to read music or how program Scratch Jr. code on a computer.  To be clear, decades from now, computers will be doing what we think of as coding.  Our students will need to understand computational thinking as digital citizens, designers, and collaborators.

Technology is not a substitute for a great teacher.  Let’s not confuse transferring a paper worksheet to a tablet with innovation, as that is a convenience and crutch that we do not advocate.

While incredibly useful to us, tablets and gadgets are simply tools in our teaching tool box.  Our school philosophy on technology reinforces digital citizenship skills needed for the 21st century and beyond.

Happy Digital Citizenship Week!

Cameron Smith, CEO of Bennett Day School