From Digital Citizenship to Digital Health and Wellness

Rachael Rachau

Technology Coach & Integrator, Collegiate School

​

​

Patty Sinkler

Director of Instructional Technology, Collegiate School

bit.ly/ATLISWorkbook

bit.ly/ATLISWorkbook

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in these materials are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of ATLIS or its member schools. Additionally, nothing herein constitutes legal advice.

The Big “Whys” for Collegiate School

bit.ly/ATLISWorkbook

• Just like national trends, we notice a significant spike in screen use, especially after the pandemic.
• We wanted to know and reflect on the ways we asked our students to engage with technology.

• We see the impacts of screens and social media on our students and we continue to wonder how we might support them in a world that is changing so quickly.

• With tradition and/or “out of the box” digital citizenship programs, we struggled with what we think are fairly common barriers:
• Teacher buy-in
• Time in front of kids
• Student buy in to the lesson

Effectiveness

Usage

Impact

Why the switch to Digital Health Over Digital Citizenship for the Middle and Upper Grades?

01

02

03

Our Reasoning and Timeline

bit.ly/ATLISWorkbook

Why the switch to Digital Health Over Digital Citizenship for the Middle and Upper Grades?

01

02

03

Our Reasoning and Timeline

bit.ly/ATLISWorkbook

Health and Wellness gave us an easy in to the curriculum- it provides dedicated time that didn’t feel like it was taking for advisory or curricular courses. It also gave us an opportunity to think about what types of lessons resonate with teenagers.

By asking students to fill out surveys to tell us about their overall screen habits, we can relatively easily personalize the lessons to their needs and experiences and makes the content more relevant and meaningful

A realistic acknowledgement that early adolescents and adolescents are inherently more inward facing at this stage and that tying this curriculum to their experiences is going to be inherently more applicative and meaningful.

Health > Citizenship

Why Health Class

Why Data?

Why the switch to Digital Health Over Digital Citizenship for the Middle and Upper Grades?

01

02

03

Pre-Lesson: The Role of Research and Data

• How we leverage surveys and student response to increase engagement, relevancy, and reflection.
• Early and fully adolescent children are naturally (and developmentally) turned inward in their reflection. Discussion “national trends” and other children’s experiences never felt fully relevant.
• Asking them to look at and think about their own experiences made a huge difference.

Pre-Lesson: The Role of Research and Data

• Every lesson begins with a survey that asks students to share their daily screen use- We use this to reflect and springboard conversation.
• Targeted questions connect with specific learning goals.
• Over the course of four years now, we’ve been able to use these responses to gather insights, make connections, and push policy change and advocacy.
• Check out and take the first survey that students see during their 8th grade retreat.

​

Let’s Take a Look at The Surveys: Data as a Driver of Discussion

Our Survey Results

Our Survey Results

Pre-Lesson Activity: Make a Copy of the Surveys

• Go into the Activity Folder and make a copy of each survey.
• Look at the layout and extra question and see if they serve your needs with your students.
• Discuss with your table and brainstorm other questions that might be helpful your your context.

Lesson #1: The Evolution of the Human Mind and Technology’s Impact

• This lesson takes a timeline-view of how human being’s brains have changed over time.
• It connects it to major evolutionary events that impact how we’ve developed and why we are the way we are.
• Students are then asked to get together to discuss their own relationships with technology, screens, social media and gaming.

Lesson #1 Activity: Candid Conversations

• Students are asked to take on roles and guide their own conversation.
• The conversation is recorded for accountability and so that we can look for common trends and trends over time.
• This ends up being one of our favorite lessons every time.

Break: Let’s take a moment to get up and walk around after so much time sitting.

Lesson #3: Monetizing our Psychology with Algorithms

• This lesson looks at the economic structures that leverage massive amounts of our “data” to “know” us.
• We look at how this structure makes money and why we are incentivized actively and passively to participate.
• We take time to look at the assumptions various websites make about us based on our engagement with our screens.

Lesson #3 Activity: A Deep Dive into Our Digital Footprint

• Using survey data from Lessons 1 and 2, we group students by their most used app.
• We then ask them to do a deep dive into the terms of service among other elements of those apps.
• Students also try to access the data and information collected on them by these companies.
• The conversations after these deep dives are always very interesting.

Break: If we did it right, that should have been 30 minutes. Let’s see what a quick stroll does for/against our ability to focus and re-engage.

Lesson #6: Algorithms and AI’s Supercharged Effect

• This lesson has been new this year to the rotation- now that AI dominates so much of the conversation, we felt it was important to include it.
• We didn’t want it to take over the curriculum, but wanted to give students a space to look critically at how it is impacting their day to day lives already and consider what is to come.
• The lesson itself is broad, but opens up avenues to conversations about copyright, morality, AI “hallucinations” and bias.

Lesson #6 Activity: Google’s Teachable Machine

• This activity asks students to train an AI model. The goal is to highlight a few things in particular:
• The sheer amount of data points necessary to effectively train an AI model to make predictions.
• How easy it is for an AI model to make mistakes and assume biases.
• The implications on how their digital (and real world) movements train, build, and monetize this “invisible” system.

Questions, thoughts, reflections?

Useful Resources and Citations

Resources

• The Center for Humane Technology provides high-quality resources for schools, parents, and youth.
• This course focus on psychological impacts, but physical ones are important, too. Body Electric does a great job explaining our physical needs from a developmental perspective.

Check out some resources that have helped us build the curriculum and citations that supported this presentation

Rachael

Patty

rachael_rachau@collegiate-va.org�

psinkler@collegiate-va.org�