Rethinking What Districts’ Digital Citizenship Should Be

Vanessa Monterosa

In summer 2014, Los Angeles Unified School District was embarking on an ambitious endeavor: Provide a personalized learning experience to all students via a 1:1 technology initiative. This meant that more than 500,000 students and nearly 25,000 educators across the district would receive a device and, along with it, instruction in the responsible use of technology.

As our district considered what responsible use meant, we knew we would have to move beyond the conversations about safety, privacy and security and explore what it means to be empowered, responsible, proactive digital citizens. This would be no small feat.

With a background in edtech research and filling the role of program and policy development specialist, I was selected to shape and develop districtwide policies that would support this instructional vision. As I scoured scholarly journals, connected with education leaders in other school districts and consulted with national nonprofits specializing in digital citizenship, I found many resources designed to support classroom teachers around digital citizenship, yet nothing about opportunities, resources and research relating to digital citizenship at the school system level.

From board of education members to our department heads, leaders at all levels needed to understand their role in supporting the implementation of digital citizenship. This was the gap I aimed to fill.

Designing Policies

School district policies in general are proscriptive, specifying what shouldn’t be done rather than providing guidance on what should be. This is especially true for district policies addressing digital citizenship, such as acceptable use policies, or AUPs.

AUPs typically focus on keeping personal technology devices secure. My work involved incorporating language around skills, dispositions and behaviors where technology enables connection, communication and collaboration.

In Los Angeles Unified, we began our policy design by convening a social media task force composed of a cross-section of district administrators and school site staff. We also conducted focus groups with principals, teachers and students, whom we invited to provide input about what concepts they considered important to include in the policies and to fine-tune definitions.

By incorporating stakeholder voices in shaping our policies, we crafted policy documents that were accessible and easy to understand. Teachers, for instance, wanted a policy that could function as an instructional tool as well, so we modeled the layout and language of our policy as a lesson with objectives and indicators to help stakeholders identify key behaviors and actions.

In addition to the AUP, I drafted the district’s first social media policy for students to provide guidance and awareness of the affordances of social media when leveraged in safe and proactive ways. For example, helping students shape an authentic digital footprint could set our students up for success related to job hiring and college admissions. More importantly, we knew our students were already engaged in these spaces, so what better way to support digital-age learners than meeting them where they are?

We also updated the district’s social media policy for employees, adding a section on the instructional opportunities of social media when working with students 13 and older. Together, the AUP and our various social media policies demonstrated our district’s digital citizenship culture and create a foundation to hold these important conversations among principals, teachers, students and families.

Key Elements

Implementing a digital citizenship program involves three key elements: policies, partnerships and professional learning. Policies reflect the values a system shares with its stakeholders, so it is important for schools and districts to consider what practices they want to be reflected in their districtwide policy.

Partnerships, both internal and external, require system coherence, clarity and calibration to ensure the digital citizenship initiative is adopted and supported districtwide. Lastly, professional learning for system-level leaders is needed to build their capacity around what it means to engage as empowered digital citizens.

POLICIES

When designing digital citizenship programs, districts should include the following:

»Participatory policy design with students and school staff to ensure the policy reflects the district’s aspirations for digital citizenship. We learned that principals and teachers hoped for a digital citizenship policy that could serve as an instructional tool rather than merely a document to sign off.

»A cross-section of stakeholders who will be strongly affected by the policy, such as the education leaders who will be responsible for implementing it and representative students who will be most affected by it, such as middle and high school students.

»Calibrated definitions and values around digital citizenship. For instance, our task force agreed that the term “acceptable” did not reflect the kind of empowered digital citizen we wanted to cultivate. Instead, we discussed what it meant to be a responsible digital citizen and thus amended the policy name to the Responsible Use Policy.

»Updated key policies with digital citizenship concepts. The policy most connected to digital citizenship is often the district’s AUP. However, these often are tied to legal requirements as well. Consider developing a social media policy to describe how an empowered digital citizen might engage online.

»Revisiting and updating key policies annually. Our world continues to be increasingly digital in new and reimagined ways. Revisiting and updating key policies ensures ongoing calibration and clarification of what we mean by digital citizenship.

PARTNERSHIPS

Digital citizenship partnerships extend beyond partnerships with external organizations such as Common Sense Media or the International Society for Technology in Education.

While these external connections are useful, interdepartmental partnerships across the school system ensure the implementation of a coherent digital citizenship program. Internal partnerships should involve a broad spectrum of teams, from mental health to law enforcement and from facilities staff to information technology specialists.

Our objective was to move students and school leaders from a narrow focus on disciplinary, proscriptive rules concerning making a secure password or not talking to internet strangers. We talked to students about the importance of being empowered digital citizens who understood the implications of their digital footprint in ways that could support their future success. Our teams communicated the digital citizenship expectations for word choice and tone of voice. Lastly, principals indicated how we could best support our school leaders through professional learning and capacity building while implementing key policies for empowered digital citizens districtwide.

As the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified makes system coherence a priority, especially around a topic that requires capacity building for leaders beyond the instructional team.

For example, the instructional team led discussions alongside information technology leaders around digital citizenship as an exercise in empowerment and participatory engagement online. The information technology team conceptualized digital citizenship differently, discussing safety, privacy and security and ensuring the district web-filtering protocols did not impede digital citizenship learning opportunities.

Because the pandemic has increased the amount of time students and staff are engaged online, mental health and counseling staff are an important part of the digital citizenship discourse. An accessible entry point to partnership might be partnering with counseling teams to discuss with teachers, students and families the implications of digital footprints for college and career success and partnering with mental health teams around social media engagement in sustaining friendships and community.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

System-level leaders cannot support students in their digital citizenship journey without embarking on one themselves. I designed and piloted a leader-focused professional learning experience called “Digital Presence with Purpose” that positioned social media as a critical space for professional growth and leader engagement, essentially giving system leaders an opportunity to practice the digital citizenship skills we identified for our students.

Three practices can provide a framework for system-level leaders to engage online and serve as digital citizenship role models for their school community:

»Sharing knowledge. Leaders establish a digital footprint consisting of what they learn at a conference, training or other professional learning opportunities. Leaders might share what they learned at a digital citizenship seminar and how they plan to implement key strategies to support students.

»Sharing resources. Educators share artifacts, research or other media that inform their thinking and their practice. Their digital footprint demonstrates their growth mindset toward their identity as education leaders. Sharing resources that add value to their instructional or leadership practices demonstrates their commitment to their craft and can inspire others to do the same.

»Sharing evidence. Educators uplift their school community by highlighting the rigorous, relevant instructional leadership activities they support through media-rich content. Examples include videos of schoolwide events, photos of culminating student projects or training certificates.

Countless students and staff can benefit from observing the district leader’s digital leadership and engagement, especially as it aligns with aspirational policies and dynamic inter-departmental partnerships.

Improvement Cycle

Policies, partnerships and professional learning are vital components of a system-level digital citizenship program. Designing and maintaining such an effort requires engaging in a continuous improvement cycle, gathering input from key stakeholders while sharing and iterating on lessons learned.

Your school community needs role models who are accessible and savvy when it comes to participating in our increasingly digital world, and this starts by recognizing the systemic attention — from policy to practice — needed to cultivate empowered digital citizens at all levels.

VANESSA MONTEROSA is a senior associate partner with New Schools Venture Fund in Los Angeles, Calif., and co-author of the forthcoming book Deepening Digital Citizenship: A Guide to Systemwide Policy and Practice (ISTE). Twitter: @DrMonterosa


Additional Resources

Vanessa Monterosa recommends these resources for school districts interested in establishing a responsible use policy:

»Los Angeles Unified School District’s Responsible Use Policy for District Computer and Network Systems.

»Los Angeles Unified School District’s Social Media Policy for Students,

»“Social Media Access in K-12 Schools: Intractable Policy Controversies in an Evolving World” by June Ahn, Lauren Bivona and Jeffrey DiScala in Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, January 2011.