A Pilot Study on Implementing Digital Citizenship Education in Hong Kong Secondary Schools

This presentation aims at sharing the quantitative and qualitative findings of a pilot project on promoting the perspectives of teaching digital citizenship education in Hong Kong secondary schools. This pilot project also aims at supporting in-service teachers in professional development on curriculum development and teaching methods. Twenty teachers from seven Hong Kong secondary schools joined this pilot project and attended professional development training workshops in the school year of 2019/20. The training workshops delivered several digital citizenship related concepts to the teachers, such as the meanings of digital citizenship, media literacy, digital commerce, digital footprint, digital etiquette, and cyberbullying. Our professional team supported teachers to design their school-based digital citizenship curriculum for trial teaching and to discuss feasible teaching methods after the training workshops. By conducting pre-and-post quantitative tests after the training workshops, there is a significant statistical difference in preference of teaching digital citizenship in terms of digital law, digital commerce, and digital security and safety. Teachers are more convinced and willing to teach digital citizenship education topics after received teacher training, especially on digital commerce and digital law. Next, the qualitative interviews conducted after observing their classroom teaching revealed there is an urgent need to equip students with media literacy, e-commerce, and digital security in a social situation affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially since there are fake stories on social and political issues. In fact, people are increasingly used to buy daily necessities, obtain social and political information, and make judgements through the internet and social media, and they could be exposed to risks of personal data, fake information and stories, and online fraud unconsciously. Suggestions are made on reviewing the secondary school curriculum in light of digital citizenship education, and equipping teachers with the methods and skills on teaching media literacy, digital commerce, and digital security.