Maddy Samson is an Ed Tech Integrator at the middle school. She used a PA Summer Grant to focus on building a Digital Citizenship curriculum specifically for the 7th grade. She felt that the “middle children of middle school” needed their own space for learning to navigating the digital world.
When I stepped into my role as the Middle School Educational Technology Integrator, I inherited two Digital Citizenship courses: one for 6th grade and one for 8th grade. I spent my first year teaching them simultaneously, learning my students’ needs in real time and redesigning lessons so they were accessible, engaging, and relevant. It was an exciting year of building, adapting, and problem-solving.
Seventh grade is a hinge year. Students are not quite the wide-eyed beginners of 6th grade, but they are not yet the more self-aware, reflective 8th graders either. It’s an age defined by transition—social, emotional, and developmental. Their online lives often expand dramatically during this year. Their friendships shift, their independence grows, and technology becomes a formative space in which they explore identity, belonging, and communication. I knew that if any group needed a thoughtful, well-constructed Digital Citizenship curriculum, it was the 7th grade.
I applied for the PA grant to give me the freedom and flexibility to build an intentional curriculum for the 7th grade students, in order to truly prepare them to navigate the digital world with confidence and care.
The resulting 8-week curriculum is built around six enduring themes:
Instead of chasing what’s popular right now, I focused on skills and understandings that would outlast any platform. The goal is to help students develop internal tools—not just external rules—for how to think and act online. Students learn to ask essential questions: Where is this information coming from? How is this platform shaping what I see? Who benefits from this technology, and who might be left out?
Week 1 is dedicated to community building. Students and I co-create norms, talk about what it means to learn together in digital spaces, and set intentions for the term. Week 8 is left open by design, providing a space to address emerging issues, student questions, or trending topics.
The curriculum draws from Learning for Justice’s digital literacy framework and Common Sense Education, both of which offer research-based, developmentally grounded structures. However, the curriculum is not simply a collection of adapted lessons. It is a cohesive, layered experience that invites students to reflect on who they are, how they engage with the digital world, and how they want to show up in digital communities.
It was important to me that this curriculum not only teach digital skills, but also help students recognize the power dynamics embedded in digital spaces. Technology is not neutral, and neither are the systems that govern it. For many students, especially marginalized students, digital spaces can be both empowering and harmful.
The curriculum includes a wide range of examples and scenarios that reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of our school and the wider world. Students learn to examine how algorithms can reinforce bias, how misinformation disproportionately impacts certain communities, and how digital tools can shape user behavior in ways that reflect broader social inequities.
These conversations are anchored in empathy, active listening, and the understanding that students’ lived experiences shape how they move through digital spaces. The goal is not to overwhelm them with abstract ethical questions, but to help them build habits of noticing, questioning, and caring—skills that are essential not only online, but in their everyday lives.
One of the most important elements of this curriculum is its commitment to accessibility for students with Language Based Learning Disabilities (LBLDs). Throughout my first year, I learned how critical it is to design materials that reduce cognitive load, offer multiple entry points, and give students the time they need to process information. Digital Citizenship, with its mix of abstract concepts and real-world implications, can be especially challenging without the right supports.
To make the curriculum truly accessible, I embedded features such as:
These supports are integral to how the curriculum functions. My goal was not to retrofit accessibility, but to design with accessibility in mind from the very first draft. This grant allowed me to take the extra time required to think through these layers and ensure that every student, not just those who excel with technology, could fully participate.
