Excited to share a new open educational resource: "Digital Citizenship: Building Safe, Kind, and Balanced Lives Online" — a free open interactive intelligent textbook for Grade 5 and 6 students!
Inspired by a query from the staff of ISD 197 (West St. Paul–Mendota Heights–Eagan Area Schools) in Minnesota, this textbook teaches students how to pause, think, and act like citizens — not just users — of the digital world.
The concepts covered are built around the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Student Standards (1.2 Digital Citizen) and aligned with the Common Sense Education topic framework, so teachers can drop it into an existing unit without re-writing their curriculum map. We also added new concepts based on recent developments in AI.
Every chapter pairs big ideas with a short graphic-novel story showing the idea happening to a character students can care about, and an interactive MicroSim that lets them try the idea for themselves. The book is guided by Maka the river otter — a mascot inspired by the otters of Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers near ISD 197 schools.
By the numbers:
• 17 chapters across 6 ISTE-aligned modules • 265 concepts in the dependency-mapped learning graph • 15 graphic-novel mini-stories with original illustrations • 8 interactive MicroSims (p5.js) • 170 quiz questions across all chapters • 267 glossary terms with plain-language definitions • 91 FAQs for students, teachers, and parents • 117,000+ words (~471 equivalent printed pages)
Topics covered: media balance, privacy, digital footprints, online relationships, cyberbullying & upstander behavior, misinformation, fact-checking, and critical thinking. Generated using my state-of-the-art Claude AI skills and the intelligent textbook framework, this open-source project demonstrates how AI can augment educational content creation while keeping content age-appropriate, kind, and rooted in a real community. We also include chapter-by-chapter reading level analysis and detailed Teacher's Guide. This course is designed to be quickly customizable by non-technical staff using Anthropic Claude or other AI systems that support agentic skills. Full source in GitHub under a liberal creative commons license.
Read the book here:
https://dmccreary.github.io/digital-citizenship/