The Seattle School Board recognizes that students use technology to play, learn, and communicate while at school and at home and finds it is important that they learn to use technology responsibly. The Board is committed to educating every student to use technology in ways that augment their learning experience, leading to analysis, evaluation, reflection, and enhanced skills of expression.  It is the goal of the Board that the principles of digital citizenship and media literacy are promoted in the District and instilled in each of its students.  

Digital citizenship reflects appropriate, legal, responsible, and healthy behavior related to current technology use, including digital literacy, ethics, etiquette, and security.  Digital citizenship includes the important skills to access, evaluate, develop, produce, and interpret media, as well as Internet safety, cyberbullying prevention and response, and permanence and impacts of their digital identity. 

Media literacy reflects the ability to analyze, evaluate, create, and act using a variety of communication tools. Media literacy includes the ability to understand how and why media messages and images are constructed and for what purposes they are used. Media literate citizens can adapt to changing technologies and develop required new skills as they engage in life-long learning. They can identify and interpret all forms of bias, including racial and other forms of explicit and implicit bias, in media messages and recognize how this bias can influence beliefs and behavior.  Media literacy will empower students to participate as informed and active citizens in a democracy.      

The Board authorizes the Superintendent or their designee to establish procedures to realize the goals of this policy.