When we talk about the curriculum, it's all about things that are supposed to be taught to students throughout their entire school life. We usually jump to the conclusion that these teachings are supposed to be the 'core' to education, math, English, science, social studies, etc. but we don't really think about how our emerging society has an effect on it and how much technology has been brought into the curriculum. For example, under the Health Education 9 curriculum, in USC9.2, under the list of resources, it provides a DVD about "Playing It Safe Online". However, I've noticed that there are no real outcomes and indicators that specifically talk about technology and safety online. While it may be inferred, I think it's also an important aspect that we need to explicitly put into the curriculum, otherwise, it can be passed over as it had for me growing up. There is, however, a guide to Digital Citizenship Education (PDF) in schools that does include resources on how to teach digital citizenship in schools and includes Ribble's Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. From the document above we see that these elements are:
From these, we can see where we need to implement it into our education curriculum. While it's great that they are adding resources to online safety in health education, we should also consider where else we should include it. Such as science for example, students now will most likely have a phone and try to research something on their own but potentially take direct quotes from sources without citing them properly and plagiarize without even meaning to. So do we include the teaching of how to properly cite and source things from scientific material in a science class? I think we should because the only time I heard about citing and sourcing materials was in English classes where I was tasked with writing essays and citing novels. Looking specifically at the Science 8 curriculum for example, under WS8.1(g) - it states to "Research a specific human practice or technology that may pose a threat to surface and/or groundwater systems in Saskatchewan" and if we ask students to do this and potentially do a project on it, are they going to know how to cite their sources and make sure that they are looking into academic sources rather than potentially fake and harmful sources that could not be true? Where do we have to explicitly implement technology safety, digital literacy, safe digital access to really get it through to students that just because we have the technology and it's fun to be on, doesn't mean we can't continue to practice safety and potentially put ourselves and personal data at risk.
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