Examining perceptions of preservice classroom teachers in terms of dimensions/elements of digital citizenship

This study was performed in order to examine the perceptions of pre-service classroom teachers in terms of dimensions/elements of digital citizenship.The participants of the study were 11 pre-service classroom teachers who were doing their practicum in Piri Reis Secondary School in the 2014-2015 academic year. Seven of the participants were female and four of them were male and their ages range from 20 to 23. When it is considered that introducing the perception of digital citizenship concept at an early age will contribute toraise good digital citizens pre-service classroom teachers were involved in the study and the perception of pre-service classroom teachers, who were digital natives according to Prensky (2001), were examined.The data were gathered via Digital Citizenship Scale developed by Kocadağ (2012), observations during the pre-service teachers' practicum for five weeks and interviews. Quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistic and descriptive content analysis used for the qualitative data. Qualitative data were also coded by other researchers to check conformability. As a result of the quantitative data gathered by the scale the levels of Digital Citizenship of pre-service classroom teacher were high. But data gathered from observations and interviews were not consistent with the scale results. It was found that teachers perceive digital citizenship as e- government applications, digital literacy as reading news online and web pages and writing in online environments, digital commerce as shopping online, digital etiquette as copyrights, digital access as accessing digital technologies, digital communication as sending e-mails and file sharing, digital health as acquisition of knowledge about health in online environments, digital security as complex and difficult passwords in online environments, digital rights & responsibilities as rights in online environments, digital law as restriction of freedom. The applications in the undergraduate education of pre-service teachers were mostly about technology knowledge and not included Digital Citizenship concept.Pre-service teachers should be trained to be a role model for 21th century learner if there is a need to educate students to meet with the 21th century needs. And digital citizenship will be integrated into the curriculum of teacher education programs, Information Technologies and Software course curriculum also curriculum of education programs starting from primary education.