Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

First Advisor

Heting Chu

Second Advisor

David Jank

Third Advisor

Bette Schneiderman

Abstract

The advances in technology in the past decades have revolutionized the field of K-12 education, and its widespread implementation has given rise to the concurrent need to educate students about its responsible usage. The concept of digital citizenship as applicable to schools includes elements like digital access, digital communication, digital literacy, digital etiquette, digital rights and responsibilities and digital security. This study examined how twelve randomly selected school districts in the Long Island region of New York presented and promoted digital citizenship on their websites. A content analysis of these school district websites was conducted to identify which elements of digital citizenship were presented. These findings were correlated with the need-to-resource capacity index of the selected school districts in order to ascertain its impact on their ability to provide digital citizenship education. In addition, major digital citizenship websites and the digital citizenship discussion forum of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) were examined to identify best practices that can aid schools in their efforts to enhance digital citizenship within their community. This study found that while there were definite signs that schools are making efforts to promote it, there was a wide variation in the presentation and number of resources related to digital citizenship. Therefore, more needs to be done to reduce the disparity. Some elements of digital citizenship were given more importance compared to the others. Digital etiquette, digital rights and responsibilities as well as digital literacy had the largest number of resources. This indicated that schools were following federal and state guidelines and also making efforts to facilitate the access and use of technology for their stakeholders. Additionally, there was evidence that the need-to-resource capacity index had an impact on the number of resources in each category of the school districts (low/average/high need). However, the variation found among the schools within the same category suggested that this cannot be considered as the only factor influencing the school’s ability to promote digital citizenship. Finally, the extensive best practices identified can serve as a repository for any K-12 school to continue to improve their efforts in implementing digital citizenship.

Download

Share

COinS