Digital Citizenship in the Mathematics Classroom

Too many students go through their schooling where their math classes looked something like this: lecture for the majority of the period, taking notes, working on textbook exercises in the last ten or fifteen minutes, homework throughout the week, and then a test at the end of the unit. It’s about time that we change that.

Digital citizenship is the continuously developing norms of appropriate, responsible, and empowered technology use.

digitalcitizenship.net

When we talk about digital citizenship in the classroom, we usually don’t talk a whole lot about mathematics. Realistically, there is a lot that we can do as math teachers to educate our students about the online world and teach them how to be good digital citizens.

Mike Ribble lists the nine elements of digital citizenship which you can take a look at here. In reference to the Saskatchewan mathematics curricula, let’s discuss how we can integrate some these elements into our math lessons!

Digital Commerce

The use of technology for buying and selling goods online, as well as the tools to assist those handling money in the digital world.

As an Etsy seller myself, my mind instantly goes to a math activity based on it. Consider a problem task similar to the following:

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You are thinking about selling your artwork on Etsy.com. You have three drawings that you would like to put up for sale. Etsy takes 5% of each sale you make. You also want to buy a new desk for your art studio which costs $220. If you want to make exactly enough money from your drawings to be able to pay for this desk, how much should you charge for each drawing?

Extension questions: How can you verify your answer? What other factors would affect how much money you make that the question didn’t address?

This problem task connects to outcome N8.2 in the Saskatchewan curriculum for grade 8 mathematics: Expand and demonstrate understanding of percents greater than or equal to 0% (including fractional and decimal percents) concretely, pictorially, and symbolically. The task goes beyond surface level understanding and forces the problem solver to discover the true meaning of a percentage and apply it to a real-life situation. It goes much deeper than a bland exercise such as “find 20% of $80”.

As far as the digital commerce aspect goes, this problem could spark a discussion of how to successfully sell items online. When you are selling items in person, it is easy to just say the item is 20 dollars and then receive a 20 dollar bill, done deal. With selling online, you have to consider the fees of the platform that you are selling on, as well as any potential shipping charges, etc. This problem task is a great opportunity to bring up a conversation with your students about making sure you charge enough on your items in order to cover your costs and still make a profit. You could even take the discussion as far as comparing the pros and cons to selling online – for example, a benefit is that selling online opens up your audience to the entire world!

Digital Communication and Collaboration

The exchange of information in the digital world with intent to educate or express emotions/identity.

As of right now, TikTok is a leading social media app that is still growing in popularity. Many teenagers, if not most, are on TikTok – whether they create content themselves or they are only there to watch others’ content. So, why not incorporate TikTok into the mathematics classroom? I was inspired to come up with this activity by the user @onlinekyne who shares math facts, stories, and riddles! TikTok isn’t just about dancing, there are people who use it to educate others! What if we had our students join in on this?

The fun thing about TikTok is that videos can be no longer than 1 minute in length. Use this to challenge your students! Present them with the following task:

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Create a video of yourself as if you were teaching someone that is not in our class about a mathematical concept that we have learned this semester. The catch: you only have one minute to get the most important ideas across. Try to be clear in your explanations yet concise. You must also make at least one connection from this outcome either to another mathematical concept you have learned (does not have to be from this class) or to a real-life application. Try to be engaging!

There is a lot of room for creativity with this general activity idea. Essentially, you could use this project to assess understanding of any outcome in any mathematics course. You may have your students choose their own outcomes to work on, or you can assign outcomes to them. A thought: if you decide to assign outcomes to the students, you could choose the outcome that they had the most difficulty with over the course of the semester and they could use this as an opportunity to boost their grade for the outcome!

As an example, let’s take a look at outcome P30.3 from the Saskatchewan Pre-Calculus 30 curriculum: Demonstrate understanding of the graphs of the primary trigonometric functions. The student could give a quick briefing on what a sine and cosine graph is and what it looks like, then connect it to something such as the unit circle or the transformation of functions. For a real-life application, they could connect it to the motion of a pendulum or the continuous rotation of a car tire.

If the student is uncomfortable with making a public TikTok, they could choose not show their face in the video by doing a voiceover on top of pictures or other media, or even use TikTok’s text-to-speech tool. They may also make their account private. Another adaptation is to make a one-minute YouTube video and publish it as unlisted (only people with the link can view it).

This activity shows students that social media can be used to educate others in a positive way. It also gives them the opportunity to practice creating meaningful content.

Digital Fluency

Understanding technology and its use. Being able to discern good information from poor information, real news from fake news, etc.

Fake news is abundant in social media. Even popular news networks can be guilty of sharing false or misleading information – particularly in graphs. It is extremely easy to look at a graph and be convinced of the conclusions that the presenter is claiming, but it is also really easy to slightly alter graphs to make the data look like it means something completely different. This can be done by changing the axes to increase by uneven intervals or starting at a baseline value other than zero; sometimes even just the context in which the data has been acquired can affect the way we analyze a graph. Take a look at this TikTok to see some examples:

@logicsoup

All these graphs contain accurate data points, but the data has just been presented misleadingly. #politics #statistics #graph #biden #leftist #viral

♬ Blade Runner 2049 – Synthwave Goose

This is such an incredible and applicable way to bring digital fluency into the mathematics classroom. Big news companies especially can be very convincing, so it is extremely important that we teach our students how to be digitally fluent and examine such graphs. These types of misleading graphs are very prevalent in popular debates such as climate change, coronavirus cases, and crime/violence rates among People of Color. It is crucial that we educate everyone on how to determine if an argument is valid or not based on the data that they present.

This activity explicitly connects to outcome FM20.7 in Saskatchewan’s Foundations of Mathematics 20 curriculum and indicator e) Support a position or decision relevant to self, family, or community by analyzing statistical data, as well as considering other factors.

I want to hear from you!

What do you think of these activity ideas? Could you see yourself using them in your own classroom? Would you adapt them in any way, and how? I encourage you to take a look at Ribble’s list of digital citizenship elements, and comment any ideas you come up with to connect them to mathematics courses!