Nearpod is a behemoth of quality multimedia content, with more than 22,000 lessons used by millions of teachers worldwide. Part of our prowess is due to our longstanding partnerships with reputable organizations like Common Sense Education. Common Sense is a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to helping families, teachers, and kids navigate the world of media through trusted ratings, reviews, and advocacy work. Common Sense Education is known for their award-winning K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum which they developed in partnership with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The curriculum includes research-based lesson resources to help students thrive in a digital world.

Nearpod & Common Sense Education: Elevating digital literacy in schools

The role of digital citizenship in the classroom

In today’s ever-evolving digital world, technology plays a big role in how we learn, interact, and work every day. From watching TV to searching online to texting a friend to exploring AI, the digital world has its own rules for using devices safely, responsibly, and respectfully in school and at home. 

Did you know that kids use an average of two and a half hours of screen media daily, and teens spend a median of four and a half hours on their smartphones, checking them 51 times per day? In this dynamic digital landscape, educators and parents now recognize the importance of digital wellness in children’s daily lives—and digital citizenship empowers students to take control of their digital lives.

Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness

As the 4Cs for 21st-century learning emphasize, today’s students and tomorrow’s citizens need to master critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. In response, Nearpod offers an innovative 21st Century Readiness Program, which is a holistic approach to embedding 21st-century learning into everyday instruction. This suite of content features interactive lessons, videos, and activities that focus on social and emotional learning, financial literacy, college and career readiness, and digital citizenship.

A leader in the digital citizenship space, Common Sense Education takes a research-based approach with its curriculum: “Each digital citizenship lesson takes on real challenges and digital dilemmas that students face today, giving them the skills they need to succeed as digital learners, leaders, and citizens tomorrow.”

In order to better equip students with these skills, Nearpod collaborated with Common Sense Education to feature lessons from their award-winning K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum, highlighting key themes of harnessing the power and the potential of technology.

New to Nearpod? Sign up for free to access a preview of these digital citizenship lessons!

Teachers can sign up for free below to access and create interactive lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to explore Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program and unlock the full power of Nearpod for their schools and districts!

Adding interactivity to existing lessons

Nearpod makes Common Sense’s curriculum interactive, providing ready-to-teach lessons that are perfect for whole class, small group, or individual instruction through both Live Participation and Student-Paced modes.

Nearpod and Common Sense design their lessons together to take advantage of Nearpod’s formative assessments and interactive activities, such as Drag & Drop, Collaborative Boards, and Draw It. We’ve embedded checks for understanding with Nearpod’s Interactive Video feature into Common Sense’s videos and woven these into lessons for a more dynamic media experience. You can assess participation, view real-time insights, and view progress through the Student Reports. Don’t forget that you can even copy an existing lesson to modify it based on students’ instructional needs, like adding an extra activity for a group of students or making edits for independent work.

New lessons on artificial intelligence literacy

This year, Common Sense has partnered with Nearpod again to transform a new suite of grab-and-go lessons on artificial intelligence (AI) literacy. With AI rapidly transforming our world, these lessons will help your students think critically about AI and its impact. Designed for grades 6-12, these quick 20-minute lessons introduce students to AI while addressing its social and ethical impacts so they can:

• Understand what AI is and how it works
• Consider some of its potential benefits and risks
• Think critically about how we can be responsible and ethical users of AI

A look inside What is AI?

In any of Common Sense’s 21st Century Readiness Program lessons, you will find multiple ways to engage the class and the individual students. For instance, in the 20-minute lesson What is AI? designed for grades 6-12, you’ll find 17 slides full of inquiry-based activities, including:

• Beginning the lesson with a Poll to connect to prior knowledge
• Then, students reflect on making real-world connections using a Collaborate Board
• AI Explained, an interactive video, provides embedded checks for understanding
• A second Collaborate Board encourages students to share their opinions and perspectives
• Then, they can use Drag & Drop to illustrate where they fall on the spectrum of AI being harmful or helpful to society
• Finally, the students use Draw It to summarize their thoughts

Exploring digital citizenship lessons

Nearpod offers more than 100 quality resources dedicated to helping kids become good digital citizens. You can filter by standard or search for Common Sense—which aligns their lessons to ELA Common Core standards, American Association of School Librarians, CASEL, ISTE, and TEKS—to explore some of the following lessons:

• Grades K-2 lesson bundles
  • Traveling Safely Online: With the power of the internet, students can experience and “visit” places virtually. Help them stay safe and promote responsible online decision-making wherever they go.
  • Internet Traffic Light: Help your students learn how to identify safe websites and apps.
  • Digital Trails: Teach students about their digital footprint, what it is, and how it is created.

• Grades 3-5 lesson bundles 
  • Rings of Responsibility: In this lesson, students will examine their in-person and online responsibilities to themselves and others.
  • Reading News Online: Show your students how to identify an online news article’s different parts and structure and analyze its purposes.
  • A Creator’s Rights and Responsibilities: Students look at the rights and responsibilities of creators and use real-life scenarios to apply copyright principles.

• Grades 6-8 lesson bundles
  • How is AI Trained?: By better understanding how AI uses data to learn and create, students can become more responsible users of artificial intelligence technology.
  • Finding Balance in a Digital World: In this lesson, students learn about the benefits of balancing digital media use in an increasingly connected world.
  • Digital Drama Unplugged: Students get a crash course in de-escalating digital drama and examine how to navigate negative online scenarios.
  • Digital Media and Your Brain: Teach students about how digital media is designed to hook users, what we can do about it, and the principles of addictive design.

• Grades 9-12 lesson bundles 
  • AI Chatbots: Who’s Behind the Screens?: In this lesson, students will explore how and why AI chatbots are designed to sound so human-like and why this can be both helpful and harmful.
  • Who’s Looking at Your Digital Footprint: Students learn more about their digital footprint and how anything they post online can affect future opportunities.
  • Clicks for Cash: Teach your students about the rise of internet advertising and how it can contribute to misinformation.
  • Social Media and How You Feel: Social media can affect our feelings. In this lesson, students learn about social media’s potential positive and negative impact on their mental wellbeing.

Plus, Nearpod and Common Sense have also developed resources in Spanish!

Building healthy digital habits

Nearpod continues to partner with best-in-class companies and organizations to bring dynamic and media-rich content into classrooms that will not only engage students but bring about academic, social, and emotional success. Both Nearpod and Common Sense believe that digital citizenship must be addressed early and often to foster healthy and balanced habits in our ever-evolving digital lives in the 21st century. Together, we can ride the ups and downs of harnessing the power of technology.

New to Nearpod? Sign up for free to access a preview of these digital citizenship lessons!

Teachers can sign up for free below to access and create interactive lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to explore Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program and unlock the full power of Nearpod for their schools and districts!

Nearpod Team

Nearpod’s award-winning platform is used by thousands of schools around the globe, transforming classroom engagement.

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