Though this year we’ve used screens more than ever for school, work and connection, it’s as important as ever to take stock of your digital wellness. In 2020, Gov. Mike DeWine declared Feb. 16-22 Digital Wellness Week to remind us to find time to disconnect from screens and reconnect with ourselves.
To thrive in all aspects of life requires young learners to find a smooth balance between their personal and digital lives. The statewide initiative was designed to encourage Ohio students to make responsible, healthy and positive decisions in our technology-filled world.
The week focuses on four core principles of digital wellness; well-being, citizenship, etiquette and safety. Well-being encourages students to maintain a balance between digital and face-to-face interactions in life. Citizenship is all about being responsible, ethical, honest and literate in today’s digital world. Etiquette is choosing to be positive with others online. Finally, safety is practicing awareness and protecting private information.
In the midst of a pandemic that has made our screens even more prevalent, New Albany-Plain Local Schools educators have teamed up with WOSU Public Media for the Digital Wellness Project.
This effort to empower everyone to live digitally balanced lives is important to build communities of young thinkers who are ready to shape tomorrow. WOSU Classroom’s Digital Wellness Project challenges students to take the pledge to ensure that they can make coherent decisions in a world run by technology.
A few New Albany educators who’ve helped make Digital Wellness Week a reality are Michael Voss, a technology director; Brynn Schaefer, a kindergarten teacher; and Amy Simpson, an intervention specialist. Combining their fields of expertise, these educators have successfully curated learning tools for students to better equip themselves to safely and successfully balance the real world with the digital one. This project also houses the culture playbook to help classrooms integrate digital wellness into the curriculum, lesson plans for K-12 classrooms, a parent’s guide and more.
WOSU Classroom offers a wide variety of in-person and online professional learning opportunities suitable for educators of all grade levels and subject areas. Its courses are available for educators wishing to extend their knowledge and experience with technology integration.
Amy Palermo
“We’re going to use technology and it’s going to do a lot of good for us in the future,” says Amy Palermo, the chief content director of educational technology at WOSU. “Our goal is to educate students to make good technological decisions because you can’t hide from it, especially not after the pandemic hit.”
WOSU’s mission is to engage, inform and inspire Ohio’s community of educators to shape the next generation of learners. For Digital Wellness Week, New Albany-Plain Local Schools is one of many districts and organizations that collaborated to create the website and the resources at www.wosu.org/classroom/digital-wellness.
The Digital Wellness Program also offers an interactive playbook for all principals and teachers in the state to be well-informed about the attitudes, practices and ideas for creating a digital wellness culture in their schools. This allows teachers at every grade level to easily implement the 20-minute lesson plans to their curriculums, to ensure that students in primary, middle and high school have all the resources and skills to interact personally, socially and educationally in the real world and in digital spaces.
Sanaya Attari is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
