Social studies teachers' digital citizenship opinions and applications

In this study, it is aimed to reveal the opinions of the social studies teachers about the concept of digital citizenship, which have important roles and responsibilities in digital citizenship education. In this basic qualitative research research, face to face interviews were conducted with 8 social studies teachers determined through maximum diversity sampling which is one of purposive sampling methods. During the interviews, a semi-structured teacher interview form was used. After the completion of the interviews, 4 of the teachers interviewed were observed during 48 hours in total. The observation form prepared by the researcher was used during the observation process. In the analysis stage of the data, content analysis is used. According to the results of the study; social studies teachers do not know the concept of digital citizenship sufficiently, most teachers have never heard of the elements of digital citizenship. They believe that social studies courses are inadequate to serve digital citizenship education. However, it was found that teachers have a positive opinion about the necessity of digital citizenship education. According to the teachers' opinions, students often use technology but digital citizenship skills need to be gained by their parents and teachers. Although the social studies course is one of the appropriate courses in terms of digital citizenship, there is not enough digital citizenship issue in the program. At the end of the research, various suggestions were made in order to raise awareness about digital citizenship and to improve digital citizenship education.