【School Interview】Using digital devices in a well-mannered way? Digital Citizenship Education at Rikkyo Primary School

The following is an interview of Mr. Teruyoshi Ishii, Director of the Media Centre at Rikkyo Primary School. Mr. Ishii is leading the way in digital citizenship education using DQ World, and we asked him about his thoughts on media education and the use of DQ World in the classroom.

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(i) The History of ICT Education at Rikkyo Primary School

Rikkyo Primary School began providing students with a device in 2013 for Year 6 students and in 2014 for Year 3 students. As of April 2017, all students of grades 3-6 have individually-owned iPads, and we have been promoting ICT education with the idea of one device per student from a very early stage in Japan.

Of course, it is important to renew learning with ICT, but nobody teaches you how to use digital devices such as tablets. Adults have the opportunity to attend workshops or lectures, but practically, there are no such opportunities for children.

Tablets have exploded in popularity since around 2013-2014, and I wonder who should teach our young students how to use them, and more importantly, how to use them in a well-mannered way. This is actually an educational issue that schools will have to take on in the next generation.

In short, we proposed that we would develop unique educational activities by introducing iPads so that children could use digital devices in a well-mannered way. With this, we persuaded other teachers to move towards one-device-per-student education.

Q. What kind of teaching did you undertake between the introduction of the one-device-per-student terminal environment and the introduction of DQ World?

First I made a manual for iPads and explained the use of iPads based on that manual. The most important thing I emphasized was that our students had to have a strong awareness of the fact that even if they could do something, they shouldn't necessarily do it.

For example, "If you have an iPad, you can take photos anywhere. But that doesn't mean you should take photos anywhere." I asked my students: 'Can I go into a convenience store and take things home without paying for them just because no one was there?' The children decided this wasn’t okay. I then asked: 'Then where does the logic come from that with an iPad, you can take pictures anywhere?' We talked along the lines of: 'You can't take photos without permission, can you?’

We started out with a textbook called 'The Manners Book for using an iPad', which was a ’rule book‘ that elaborated on general rules of use, but we changed the name to 'Manners Book' in 2017. This was because the moral part of the book is important. Being able to follow the rules means that you have 'good manners', and people who lack good manners have a fundamental problem.

In the future, the more things we can do, the more children need to be aware of what they should not do, even if they can do it. In order to convey this properly, we have been using our manual to explain this to children in the classroom.

(ii) The Transition to Digital Citizenship Education

At Rikkyo Elementary School, there were only online classes until the beginning of the second semester of 2021. As such, I first made videos produced by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology available for students to watch on a website I was creating called the Information Moral Project, and had them make and submit notes on the content of these videos and their impressions.

In information morality education, we are told that this kind of thing is dangerous, that primary school students may not even have this kind of knowledge. Therefore, we set up a strategy to first make the children aware of the fact that there are many scary things that they need to be mindful of, and then have them learn how to live their lives in a way that prevents these things from happening in DQ World. The children were then asked to learn how they could live without such things happening in DQ World.

When it comes to information morality and digital citizenship, it is usually difficult to come up with specific items to teach children. However in the case of DQ World, the minimum eight steps to be taught are clearly indicated, making it very easy for the children to learn and for teaching staff to incorporate.

Q. What was the reaction of the children when they first came into contact with DQ World?

From the children's point of view, the interface is very game-like, so even if they didn't really understand what they were supposed to do, I got the impression that they were very conscious of wanting to play the game. I think it was very easy for them to learn because it was like a role-playing game.

When watching the information morality video, some of the students said, "I am now afraid to connect to the internet.” There were also children who said, "There were so many scary things said in the video , the internet makes me nervous." I was impressed by the fact that some of the children realized that, in a way, DQ World was the solution to their fears.

In the digital world, my student’s spontaneous realization that 'there are a lot of bad people here, but we can overcome them through digital citizenship, and that we have to protect our own lives' was something that emerged from their own initiative.

I think that the digital citizenship content of DQ World, especially when considered with DQ World’s critical thinking content, is not only about digital citizenship. I feel that critical thinking itself is not only directly related to digital citizenship, but also to life in general. Hence, it is easy to expand these aspects in teaching.

(iii) Demonstrative Results - Before and After Introducing DQ World

A questionnaire answered by the children before the introduction of DQ World showed that 19.7% of them had faced some kind of internet-related trouble in the past year. The most common categories of trouble, in descending order, were those related to the morality of citizenship in the digital world, cyberbullying and cyber security.

Specifically, the most common responses were that the children had problems with friends in chat rooms or with strangers while playing games. In the area of security, there were also many instances where children accessed sites that they should not have been able to, or they went to dangerous pages through online advertisements and so on.

The post-questionnaire shows that 7.7% of children faced some kind of internet-related trouble after the introduction of DQ World. The most common categories of trouble were in the areas of screen time, privacy and cyberbullying. On the other hand, all but the children who had problems with privacy said that the problems they were currently facing had improved.

Q. Have there been any comments from parents about DQ World?

In the same survey, regarding whether or not there were conversations with parents about DQ World and internet usage, nearly 70% of respondents said that there were conversations before the introduction of DQ World, and more than 30% of all parents said that there were more conversations after the introduction of DQ World.

Specifically, it seems that children are having proper conversations about the items mentioned earlier as examples of problems they face, such as "not giving out personal information" and "when an advertisement or pop-up appears, if you can't decide for yourself, don't press it immediately and ask for advice". It is precisely because they have acquired this kind of basic knowledge and communication skills that they are able to make use of the terminals without major problems.

(iiii) For Schools That Are Beginning to Realize the Importance of Digital Citizenship Education

As a social studies teacher, I feel that it is important to connect citizenship education, which was central to the creation of social studies, to learning through the use of digital devices as the starting point. In public schools, I think it would be easy to develop this in connection to moral education.

It is true that we are creating a new kind of learning, but this can also mean that we are promoting creativity and critical thinking and are using digital devices as output tools to prepare children for life in the digital society of the future. This will naturally require a moral compass for living in a digital society, and as primary school students, they will first and foremost need to learn how to behave in such a society.

At Rikkyo Primary School, when we heard about DQ World, we decided to give it a try and now the children are learning on their own. From the next year onwards, I hope to focus on how to teach and instruct children based on their mastery of the eight skills of DQ World. I believe that in my position as a teacher I will have to compare this with what I have learnt, and if my students have not mastered these skills, to explain why and to assist them in improving.

In the long term, in addition to the fourth and fifth graders who are currently using DQ World, we are also planning to introduce DQ World to the first grade. Our sixth graders who have mastered DQ World will assist them, and deepen their learning in stages through interactions between different grades. We hope that the example of Rikkyo Elementary School will be a useful reference for other schools.

---Thank you very much!