Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship has several similarities with the traditional idea of citizenship. InCtrl has created helpful videos for introducing the idea of digital citizenship to both teachers and students. Both are ways of existing within the world as well as within discrete communities within that world, and both are governed by codes of behavior and ethics that lay out the correct way of participating in those communities and the world as a whole. Both digital citizenship and traditional citizenship are ways of participating in those groups while fulfilling the roles, rights, and responsibilities that allow those groups to function. Digital citizenship, however, raises some unique concerns. While it shares the necessity of respect for the rights of others, digital citizenship complicates things by adding the need for respect for information and ideas on a much larger scale. Additionally, the growing connectedness of the world and social networks has seen the rise of problems that evolved as a result of the new advancements in social media. Cyber-bullying is a widespread issue,  and stems from the use of emerging technology to complicate and exacerbate an issue common in the world of regular citizenship. ISTE has created an infographic that helps compare the two different types of citizenship that makes relating the two quite painless.
While the two citizenship categories differ, the principles of traditional citizenship are contained in digital citizenship. To illustrate the commonality, it would be beneficial to look at the issue of cyber-bullying. While bullying is by no means a new invention, the advent of technology that enables the bullying to follow victims into the online world has amplified the adverse effects. Whereas bullying victims could at least look forward to a break from bullying at the end of the school day, cyber-bullying means that the victims are accessible virtually 24/7. As a result, the necessity of teaching and modeling respectful and empathetic interactions online has never been more crucial. This responsibility rests with parents as well as teachers, and as students grow up in an increasingly digital society, it is the responsibility of adults, who ostensibly "full" digital citizenship, to initiate the students into this new realm of citizenship. 

The teacher's role in terms of teaching digital citizenship is both explicit and demonstrative. Teachers need to clearly instruct the students in the specific requirements of digital citizenship as well as always modeling those tenets in class and in all communications or online interactions. 
Sources: ISTE (n.d.). Citizenship in the Digital Age. https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=192

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