The past few months for me have been a very busy time preparing to roll out notebook computers to our year 10 students as a pilot for our 1:1 program. More about the rollout itself later. One of the things we wanted to achieve before the rollout was to have the students think, just a little more deeply, about their responsibilities as Christians using technology.
With this in mind, I’ve developed a course in Digital Discipleship. I’ve taken the idea of digital citizenship, and expanded upon it to think about the concept from a Christian perspective.
I have broken the course down into 5 modules:
- Salty Networking – how can you use social networking to be ‘salt and light’.
- My Spiritual Footprint – when people find you online, do they also find Christ?
- Being a disciple (What is truth?) – Where do we find our truth?
- Security – how to be safe
- In case of emergency, break glass – what to do, if and when it all goes wrong.
Our students have had to work through this course, comprising a mix of video resources, thought provoking forum posts and activities, and a fairly simple quiz at the end. They are expected to successfully to complete the course (to my satisfaction) before they will be issued with a notebook computer.
I consider the course itself slightly ‘unfinished’ and definitely open for improvement. I reached the point where it just needed to be given to students, and couldn’t spend time on any further development for this cohort. It will definitely be further developed in the future.
For the most part, students have engaged with it well. Some were reluctant, but the carrot (stick?) of not receiving a notebook until it was complete was quite effective.
If you would like to use the course, I’ve made it available in my Dropbox. It is a moodle course, so you’ll need to install it to your local moodle instance.
Digital Discipleship by Dave Youl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Update – I’ve now made the Digital Discipleship course available via a wiki: Digital Discipleship. I’m hopeful that this will allow others to collaborate with me on this project – both by improving what is already there, and also by expanding the project to include relevant material for students of any age to consider their use of digital technology from a Christian perspective. Please contact me if you would like to be involved.
Youly - ICT in Education 