Welcome to the second instalment of our eSafety education journey! In our first blog post, we justified the importance of teaching eSafety to 9-10 year-olds and explored the content’s significance. Now, we’ll delve into the exciting world of teaching strategies and underpinning pedagogy, integration with other learning areas, and the crucial task of catering for diversity and inclusion.
Appropriate teaching strategies and underpinning pedagogy
To equip our young digital citizens with the knowledge, understanding, and skills needed to make informed online choices, in HPE, teachers embrace a salutogenic strengths-based approach. Our students develop their “assets, capabilities, and resources” to navigate the digital landscape, balancing their online activities, safeguarding private information, and recognising and reporting cyberbullying.
We employ a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach for lesson planning. This approach ensures that our teaching goals are based on desired outcomes and that students receive the support they need through specific strategies and scaffolding, providing an enriched learning experience. Our teaching also includes tiered questioning based on Bloom’s Taxonomy to foster critical thinking.
Our unit’s structure is modelled on a combination of the 4Cs (critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication) and age-appropriate hands-on constructivist activities. This approach bolsters reasoning as students engages in a critical inquiry project-based assessment. Such pedagogy empowers students to take ownership of their learning, making it more motivating, memorable, and meaningful.
Integrated approaches and links to other learning areas
Our ‘Two Cybers’ unit extends beyond traditional boundaries. It integrates with English and Digital Technologies, enabling students to gain a deeper understanding of persuasive online devices, information systems, and online communication. This approach aligns with the Australian Research Council’s call for a holistic and responsive approach to eSafety, literacy, and digital technologies.
Students work toward their summative assessment by engaging in online searches of digital information, identifying features of online texts, and selecting appropriate software programs to construct and publish their work. This project not only cultivates digital citizenship but also prompts students to consider their privacy needs and the responsible use of technology.
Catering for diversity and inclusion
In line with the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2020), teachers are committed to promoting equity to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to succeed. To achieve this, our unit plan, lessons, activities, and classroom setup are structured based on a Differentiated Instruction Framework and UDL framework.
Our structure incorporates various differentiated activities and strategies, ensuring that every student’s unique needs are met. We use a diagnostic assessment to group students by ability, allowing likeability students to work together with scaffolded support. The remaining groups consist of mixed abilities to encourage peer-supported constructivist learning in the zone of proximal development, aligning with Vygotsky’s theories.
We employ teacher questioning based on Bloom’s Taxonomy with differentiation in low- or high-order questions. Roles within mixed ability groups are assigned based on the differentiated needs of the learners.
Applying the UDL framework, teachers provide learners with templates, scaffolded explanations, and multi-model instruction. We also incorporate activities that support body movement, accommodating First Nations’ students, and provide support for English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) students in reading/writing and technical language use.
Finally, we allow students to choose the style of assessment that best suits their skills and preferences, ensuring they can demonstrate what they have learned. Our teaching strategies are adaptable, tailored to students’ readiness, interests, and preferences.
In the next blog post, we’ll explore resource considerations and the impact of teaching. Stay tuned as we continue our journey toward nurturing responsible digital citizens! The next article is about the resource considerations and impact of teaching and can now be found here.
For a tangible example, check out our unit plan and lesson plan. An assessment exemplar can be found here.
