Response to Digital Citizenship in School

I am a huge fan of technology; I believe it makes life, tasks, and communication much simpler.  I use technology for almost everything – homework, chatting with family or friends, online shopping, downloading music, etc.  However, I was never aware of the nine element of digital citizenship until it was mentioned in class and I read the article, 'Digital Citizenship in School', by Mike Ribble.  Now that I am more knowledgeable about digital citizenship, I can see how I was/still am irresponsible with technology.  Due to my lack of knowledge of digital security and digital commerce, I have personally been scammed a countless number of times.  Here is an example of my lack of digital citizenship: sophomore year of college I was looking for a roommate to fill a fourth room in my apartment.  I posted an ad on Craigslist in which I got a flooding amount of responses; a lot of which were people from overseas.  “Rebecca from Finland” was a scammer and a hacker – she made me believe that she was a legitimate person and conned me into giving her my landlord’s information.  My landlord informed me of the scam and I was in pure shock and disbelief due to my lack of knowledge of digital citizenship.  To prevent this from happening to future generations, technology along with digital citizenship should be present in today’s curriculum.  However, there is much controversy over having technology instilled into children’s curriculums.  Yes, children are extremely irresponsible with technology and are constantly getting in trouble for it; ranging from, but not limited to, sexting, cyber bullying, and pirating.  That is because children, and still some adults, are unaware of digital citizenship.  The issue within the curriculum is that “the focus is on learning the technology itself, with little time given to discussing what is or isn't appropriate.”  Technology is important to the students’ future and educators need to understand that.  Day by day society is becoming more technology reliant and the students need to know how to use technology and be safe about it.  That is why I strongly believe technology, with digital citizenship as a co-requisite, should be instilled into the curriculum.  This way there is a perfect balance of learning technology and safety in order to ensure that society is maintaining good digital citizenship.