A First Step: The Cyber Citizenship Portal

The Cyber Citizenship project began in order to help resolve some of the challenges at this intersection of digital and media literacy, digital civics and citizenship, and cybersecurity and information threat awareness, with a special focus on aiding teachers. Launched in December 2020 as a partnership between Cyber Florida, the Florida state education system’s cybersecurity program, and New America’s education and national security policy teams, our goal is to support educators seeking to build students' resilience against the new challenges and threats of the digital world.

The project’s initial activities included two key lines of effort. The first was to seek to bring together and aid the varied groups wrestling with the above issues from all the different perspectives. They ranged from education policymakers at the federal and state level to teams working on topics of disinformation and extremism at organizations like the White House and Department of Defense. This included building a network of partnerships with groups that ranged from Florida universities to NAMLE and ISTE. It also convened a working group of educators, policymakers, and practitioners who share a common interest in improving the cyber citizenship skills of our nation’s K–12 students. The diversity shows the importance of crossing field boundaries, as they ranged from high school teachers to tech policy experts to even National Security Agency officials. The goal is to break down field barriers and form a community of practice.

The project’s second line of effort explored how to provide educators with more ready access to needed resources. As discussed earlier, parallel to the need to convene people is the need to convene and organize the ever-growing set of tools and technologies designed to help teachers and students learn skills of resilience.

This led to a new project to build a free, easily accessible, searchable database to answer this call, the Cyber Citizenship Portal, set to launch later in 2021. Links to digital resources will be made available in one searchable location, with filters to help find tools and instructional resources matched for specific age groups and subject areas. Important to educator needs, it will be aligned with the academic standards that shape so many teaching choices.

In its first years, the portal will focus on supporting educators in K–12 schools, including teachers, librarians, curriculum advisors, and leaders of extracurricular programs across various grade levels. A secondary audience includes educators in higher education institutions and those who are working with adult learners.

In designing the portal, we have been guided by the model of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons site, which, in addition to building community hubs around topics, also enables educators to enter key words in a simple search bar or use an advanced searching page to filter for grade-level, type of tool, and more.¹ Based on interviews with educators about their needs, our portal will adopt a similar organizing framework, to enable them to find resources that are not only OER (which are not only free but also reusable and adaptable) but also those that are free yet copyrighted or restricted in some way and resources that require payment.

As we are a Florida state government supported initiative, the first stage of our portal development will concentrate on search functionality to help educators seeking materials that match Florida’s academic standards. However, the entire database will be open and relevant to educators outside of Florida too.

This experimental project points to new areas for expansion. What is needed is a one-stop shop for tools and information, providing a connection point for the many organizations getting involved in this space, not to mention a sustained community for researchers and practitioners across different district and state borders. However, each state has different standards. While state education policymakers can try to align with each other on the emerging and overlapping areas of cyber citizenship skills, the hard reality is that this is not going to be achieved in the near future. Instead, we hope future iterations of the portal under development can be extended, copied, or adapted for different audiences of users in different states or countries (such as tagging tools by not just grade level, but also by language). One concept is to use web-based location in the same way that an e-commerce site does, to provide entry to centralized space, but allowing educators to search by filters related to their own education system. Thus, they can meet their particular needs, while still being part of a larger community for sharing curricula and best practices across borders.