Digital Moderation

Digital Wellness Week creates a smarter relationship with technology

By Sanaya Attari

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 educators to shape the balance the real world next generation of learnwith the digital one. This ers. For Digital Wellness project also houses the Week, New Albany-Plain culture playbook to help Local Schools is one of classrooms integrate many districts and organidigital wellness into the zations that collaborated curriculum, lesson plans to create the website and for K-12 classrooms, a the resources at www. parent’s guide and more. wosu.org/classroom/

WOSU Classroom digital-wellness. offers a wide variety of The Digital Wellness in-person and online pro- Program also offers an fessional learning oppor- interactive playbook for all tunities suitable for edu- Amy Palermo principals and teachers cators of all grade levels in the state to be welland subject areas. Its courses are avail- informed about the attitudes, practices able for educators wishing to extend their and ideas for creating a digital wellness knowledge and experience with technol- culture in their schools. This allows ogy integration. teachers at every grade level to easily

“We’re going to use technology and implement the 20-minute lesson plans to it’s going to do a lot of good for us in the their curriculums, to ensure that students future,” says Amy Palermo, the chief con- in primary, middle and high school have tent director of educational technology at all the resources and skills to interact WOSU. “Our goal is to educate students personally, socially and educationally in to make good technological decisions the real world and in digital spaces. because you can’t hide from it, especially not after the pandemic hit.” Sanaya Attari is a contributing writer.

WOSU’s mission is to engage, in- Feedback welcome at feedback@ form and inspire Ohio’s community of cityscenemediagroup.com.