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The responsibility lies with everyone!

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Administrators should ensure that within school everyone has access to some sort of technology either through computers, iPads, a technology class, etc..

Do not overlook those who may not have access to digital tools by having everything online. provide options for both digital and non digital data.

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Digital Commerce is essential for online buying by the Financial Secretary at your school as well as teachers. Ensure through proper training that they understand the guidelines for the district.

Teachers should also implement and teach age appropriate digital commerce.

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As teachers work with students to understand online access, etiquette, health and wellness, and rights and responsibilities, there's one aspect of digital citizenship they often overlook: digital commerce. And yet it has significant implications for students, both personally and financially. The electronic buying and selling of goods, after all - be it on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, via Craigslist, or just through regular visits to the App Store - is now ubiquitous for people of all ages.

Clearly, it's time we start teaching about digital commerce. But what should we say? Print out this infographic to give students a cheat sheet for safe online shopping and selling. Then read on to get a quick-and-dirty curriculum plan.

Click the image below to download Infographic file (PDF)
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Mike Ribble, author of Digital Citizenship in Schools and director of information technology for Manhattan-Ogden Unified School District 383 in Manhattan, Kansas, says it's important for students to understand what digital commerce looks like today and what buying online means for all of us.

He says the ease with which things can be purchased online opens the door not only to safety and security issues, but to financial lessons as well. "We put locks on our phones, but when we hand it off to friend and family, things can happen," Ribble notes. Like when a child has access to a grandparent's phone and downloads an app without a second thought. After all, what's $1.99?

"The child isn't being malicious. Perhaps they just went ahead and followed the intuitive nature of today's digital commerce," Ribble explains.

Jenn Scheffer, mobile learning coach and instructional specialist for Burlington Public Schools in Massachusetts, confirms that the ease of online buying means we also need to be teaching kids about how to be savvy consumers. Scheffer, a former high school business and marketing teacher, says we shouldn't overlook smart online shopping when we teach about finance, especially since some students may be creating their own shopping sites to sell entrepreneurial products or services.

"Kids need to know that things like enrollment fees, delivery charges, special offers and rewards program will pop up and they can end up spending a lot more than they anticipated or buying things they didn't know they were buying," Scheffer says.

Ribble and Scheffer advocate for teaching students how to safely make online purchases. Here are several topics they say should be part of the discussion:

Website reliability. Show students how to check the URL bar and website address to see where a link is taking them. We often assume that links are taking us where we want to go, but that's not always the case. Does the URL bar say Target.com, for example, or something else? Checking the URL assures that users aren't being redirected to a secondary site that captures personal information.

Fraud and identity theft.These are often the biggest concerns in the discussion of digital commerce. Students need to know what to do if they think they've been defrauded or their identity has been stolen. Talk with students about how to report fraud and who they should tell: their email carrier, the primary website, website hosts like GoDaddy or On-Site, a social media company, their local consumer protection agency, or the state attorney general's office, depending on how the intrusion occurred.

Secure sites. Show students how to determine if a website is secure, especially if they are providing credit or debit card information. Look for URLs that include https. That "s" stands for "secure" and means the site has encryption to help protect financial information. A yellow lock icon in the lower right-hand corner assures the same protection.

Use of public computers. Kids often think nothing of logging in to a public computer and making a purchase at a library or school. Remind them that there's always potential for people to pull information off of public machines. It's not a bad idea to also talk about data skimming at ATM machines.

Money management skills. Take time to review basic money management. Students must understand that just because it's easy to click on something, that doesn't mean it's free. You will be responsible for paying the piper at some point.

Consumer skills. Students will also benefit from a lesson on how to be savvy consumers. Go over how to read product reviews, how to read and understand terms and conditions of purchases, and additional fees that can be added to purchases. Show them how to leave a review if a product or service they purchase is sub-par.

Leveraging social media. Many young people trust the reviews of online strangers more than friends. After all, it's easy to get caught up in Yelp reviews. Explain that they can also crowdsource information on products or services they are considering purchasing from folks they know and trust on social media platforms.

Looking for additional resources on digital commerce? Here are a few sites that might help:

For a closer look at all aspects of digital citizenship, check out Ribble's Digital Citizenship in Schools, recently released in its third edition.

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If online shopping and selling aren't part of your business and finance lessons, you're doing your students a disservice. Here's a printable infographic guide on safe online shopping for your classroom and a quick-and-dirty curriculum to teach students how to protect their financial and personal information online.

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Administrators need to ensure that teachers know and are responsible for teaching students how technology works.

Browsers

Search Engines

Online School Resources

Digital Sources

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While the word "literacy" alone generally refers to reading and writing skills, when you tack on the word "digital" before it, the term encompasses much, much more.

Sure, reading and writing are still very much at the heart of digital literacy. But given the new and ever-changing ways we use technology to receive and communicate information, digital literacy also encompasses a broader range of skills-everything from reading on a Kindle to gauging the validity of a website or creating and sharing YouTube videos.

The term is so broad that some experts even stay away from it, preferring to speak more specifically about particular skills at the intersection of technology and literacy.

The American Library Association's digital-literacy task force offers this definition: "Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills."

More simply, Hiller Spires, a professor of literacy and technology at North Carolina State University, views digital literacy as having three buckets: 1) finding and consuming digital content; 2) creating digital content; and 3) communicating or sharing it.

Finding and Consuming

In some formats, "consuming" digital content looks pretty much the same as reading print. Reading a novel on a basic e-reader requires knowing how to turn the device on and flip pages back and forth, but other than that, it isn't so different from reading a book. A PDF of a New York Times article looks a lot like the page of a print newspaper, except that it appears on a screen.

Donald Leu, an education professor at the University of Connecticut and a recognized authority on literacy and technology, describes this sort of digital reading as "offline reading."

"It's not interactive, ... there's one screen, and you just have to read it," he explained. "It's the same as reading a [paper] page."

The added skills needed for this kind of reading take just a few minutes to teach.

In comparison, what Leu calls "online reading," in which a digital text is read through the internet, requires a host of additional skills. For instance, a New York Times piece viewed on the web may contain hyperlinks, videos, audio clips, images, interactive graphics, share buttons, or a comments section-features that force the reader to stop and make decisions rather than simply reading from top to bottom.

"The text is designed so that no two readers experience it in the exact same way," said Troy Hicks, a professor of literacy and technology at Central Michigan University.

The reader determines, among other things, when to click on videos or hyperlinks, how long to stray from the initial text, and whether and how to pass the information along to others.

The process of finding digital content to read also necessitates different skills than finding print texts. In seeking print materials, students might flip through magazines or head to the library and search through stacks of books. They learn to use a table of contents and an index to locate information within a book.

But part of digital literacy is learning to search for content in an online space. Students have to query a search engine using keywords and navigate those results, including assessing the reliability of particular authors and websites.

Creating Content

Digital literacy also refers to content creation. That includes writing in digital formats such as email, blogs, and Tweets, as well as creating other forms of media, such as videos and podcasts.

Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, talks about digital authorship as "a form of social power." At a weeklong professional-development institute on digital literacy held at URI this past summer, she showed examples of student activists sharing their messages about the Black Lives Matter movement through YouTube videos.

Creating digital content is a "creative and collaborative process that involves experimentation and risk-taking," she said. There's more risk-taking than in print writing because digital writing is so often meant to be shared.

Sharing and Communicating

While traditional writing can be a personal endeavor, digital writing is generally intended to be communicated with others. And digital-writing tools are designed to make that easy to do.

As North Carolina State's Spires and her co-author, Melissa Bartlett, wrote in a 2012 white paper about digital literacy and learning, "Web 2.0 tools are social, participatory, collaborative, easy to use, and are facilitative in creating online communities."

That makes digital writing a potentially powerful lever for social good, allowing students to "actively participate in civic society and contribute to a vibrant, informed, and engaged community," as the ALA notes.

It also makes digital writing a potentially dangerous tool-decisions about when and what to share online can have repercussions for a student's safety, privacy, and reputation.

For that reason, learning about appropriate internet behavior is also a part of digital literacy, many say.

"We need to help kids see they can use digital tools to create things and put things out into the world, but there's responsibility that comes with that," said Lisa Maucione, who attended the URI institute and who is a reading specialist for the Dartmouth public schools in Massachusetts.

Evolving Technology

Because the term "digital literacy" is so wide-ranging, it can cause confusion. What exactly is someone talking about when he or she refers to digital literacy? Is it the consumption, creation, or communication of digital material? Or is that person discussing a particular digital tool? Do technology skills like computer coding fall under the digital-literacy umbrella as well?

Some experts prefer the term "digital literacies," to convey the many facets of what reading and writing in the modern era entails.

"The concept should instead be considered plural-digital literacies-because the term implies multiple opportunities to leverage digital texts, tools, and multimodal representations for design, creation, play, and problem solving," Jill Castek, a research assistant professor with the Literacy, Language, and Technology Research Group at Portland State University, wrote in an email.

Leu of UConn avoids the term altogether.

"Is someone who is 'digitally literate' equally literate when searching for information, when critically evaluating information, when using Snapchat, when using email, when using text messaging, when using Facebook, or when using any one of many different technologies for literacy and learning?" asked Leu in an email. "I think not."

He prefers the term "new literacies," which he said better conveys how rapidly technology is changing. Other experts have used terms like "literacy and technology," "multiliteracies," and "21st century literacies."

But for now, digital literacy seems to be the prevailing term among educators. "I understand this is the term that is popular today," Leu said, "just as I understand a newer term will appear in the future that will replace it."

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While the word "literacy" alone generally refers to reading and writing skills, when you tack on the word "digital" before it, the term encompasses much, much more. Sure, reading and writing are still very much at the heart of digital literacy.

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Schools should use various types of technology within the school.

Blogging

Social Media Sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat, ect..)

Texting

Email

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Administrators understand the laws that deal specifically with technology and freedom of speech as it pertains to student and teacher rights. Teachers understand and implement district and school policies, which should be documented in Teacher Handbook.
Ensure when creating professional development or having students research that they site information.
Report inappropriate use.

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Staff demonstrates appropriate behavior for themselves and students by modeling how to interact with teachers and other faculty on-line.

Cyberbullying

Texting at school

Reporting inappropriateness

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Online etiquette is about more than asking that troll to please pass the mousepad! Learn the do’s and don’ts of netiquette, and how to create respectful emails, IMs, and blogs.

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Administrators create guidelines and ensure teachers assume part of the responsibility for developing digital citizens in a healthy way.
Ensure teachers aren't over saturating students with digital technology. Create a balance.

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Reminders and advice about health and wellnes

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Administrator work with technology factors and the district to ensure students are protected while using technology in the school.

Network Security

Personell and student records security

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The Internet is useful and fun, but is it safe? It can be, if you follow Moby’s simple tips and learn about digital citizenship and how to manage chat rooms, IMing, and cyberbullying!