With October right around the corner comes a very important week at NDB: Digital Citizenship Week.

Digital Citizenship Week, which is from October 1 through 5 this year, has been recognized by the California Department of Education as an important week to bring awareness to “safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world.”

At NDB, the week was originally introduced four years ago by the Tiger Tech Team, which is moderated by Science teacher Rebecca Girard. They realized that there was so much room for improvement on technological usage within the school.

As a scientist, Girard knew that the proposed idea to bring awareness to digital citizenship would not be accepted unless she provided data to support the  proposal, and the team began working alongside a company called Clarity, which analyzed data collected from the infamous, bi-annual Brightbytes survey sent to the school.

The data collected by the Brightbytes survey, displayed through numbers and graphs, determined that digital citizenship is one of the most in-need areas for improvement in the NDB community as reported by students, teachers, and staff.

Fortunately, though, the years of the team coming together to discuss and plan  NDB’s incorporation of technology have significantly paid off. Comparing results year after year have demonstrated that both students and teachers feel more confident in their technology skills.

Nonetheless, there is still room for improvement. The most recent Brightbytes data collection showed that 37% of students and 43% of teachers do not discuss cyberbullying and how to respond in such situations.

In order to increase awareness about online safety and use of technology, the team has come up with a groundbreaking idea. Working with Girard, the team is designing a game that will hopefully launch to the student and parent audience next semester, where participants can rack up points and earn prizes by simply learning how to complete certain functions on their computer.

Currently, the teachers are the hamsters in the first trial run of the game, and they are extremely into it with English teacher Adam Currier as the lead scorer and Science teacher, Dr. Liz Hegarty not far behind.

The last few years have brought about huge improvements in student, parent, and teacher awareness regarding the importance of digital citizenship, and there is no doubt this year will continue this trend.