Duration: 1:19
Sean Lyons, Development Manager from NetSafe, discusses the definition for digital citizenship and how it fits into the National Curriculum. He explains that the focus of cybersafety has expanded beyond policies and procedures to include discussion, action, and teachable moments in the classroom. Students need to build skills and knowledge to effectively manage cyber challenges themselves, and become confident and successful digital citizens.
I'm Sean Lyons. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at NetSafe. NetSafe's an independent not-for-profit organisation that's focused around digital citizenship and cybersafety and we're largely funded by the Ministry of Education. As a cybersafety organisation we’ve always had a focus around cybersafety skills but it becomes increasingly obvious when you look at the way in which people use online that cybersafety skills alone are not all that’s required. We used to talk traditionally about educating the individual and that would be useful, and it is useful but we realise that there needs to be more than that around it. We need to have an educated environment around those citizens, those individuals. So for us coming up with a definition of a cyber citizen was combining some of those cybersafety skills along with digital literacy and then if that definition was going to be useful to schools we realised we had to find a place for that inside the National Curriculum and this iteration of the curriculum had a useful home for us, I guess, if you like, in terms of the values and the key competencies. So what we have tried to do is put together those cybersafety skills, that digital literacy, and those parts of the curriculum and the point at which those three things merge for us has allowed us to come up with the definition for what a digital citizen is.