Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: digital wellness

41 Questions to Support Your Digital Wellness

I ran across a thought leader who posted 41 questions to help his readers unpack their relationship with technology. The author is L.M. Sacasas, and here is his post. NY Times podcaster and journalist Ezra Klein dives deep with L.M. Sacasas to unpack several questions with exemplars. It is an episode really worth listening to.

41 questions are a lot to go through as they really provoke and push one to pause and contemplate the influence of technology. But I think it is worth considering how we, as educators, can use the questions in our class discussions on digital wellness. I also can see bringing the questions into individual parent meetings, workshops, and the school parent portal.

Families can pick questions to discuss during family meetings. An excellent connection is to bring in the family mission statement listing the values of the family to see how they can be incorporated into answering the questions. It would take a series of meetings, of course. Still, the time spent not only helps family members think deeper about how technology affects them, but the question-answering and reflection time also is an excellent model to help individuals stop and go through the reflection process about several influences upon their lives.

Most of the questions can be adapted to be understandable for Middle and High School students. One blended learning approach is having the students respond to the questions outside of class, recording their answers using an online discussion tool to get some sharing going before class. Once in class, students can work in groups to share their responses and possibly develop scenarios of specific tech tools to document how they answer the questions.

And just as with the parents, if you previously did some work with students on values clarification, you could do a separate lesson with students looking through the lens of their values to see how much their tech use lines up with their belief system.

It would take some time to choose and adapt the questions that elementary students can answer by doing junior versions, possibly with some scaffolding that includes real-life examples.

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Student Journaling with Big Life Journal

Student journaling to reflect on school subjects and/or unique ideas is a powerful and proven tool. Several of my posts cover this topic of student journals/planners. I recently ran across a company called Big Life Journal that provides journals based on SEL and aspects of Positive Psychology. I will be ordering copies to review but what I am seeing on the website looks good regarding the prompts, topics, and templates that can help students grow their self-understanding while adding “tools” to their personal wellness toolkits.

An essential part of my working with parents is to give them parenting materials that include strategies and templates to put them in the role of a life coach for their children. Hopefully, the Big Life journals for elementary and middle/high school students can be a helpful addition to my parent coaching toolkit.

Our Wellness Team could design educational materials and workshops to help parents use journals to support their children’s coaching. I could see my subsequent school purchasing copies for all students or promoting the idea of parents buying the books. I could also see using the parent portal wellness section to house the tutorials and the community wellness blog to post weekly strategies for using the journals.

Another approach could be to go through the school wellness program to have classroom teachers in the elementary assigning tasks in the journals for students to do in class and/or at home, depending on how the school uses the journal. My vote would be for home use with a possible teacher/parent partnership as a big part of the effort to grow parent understanding of how to support their children’s emotional, social, and general wellness growth.

Again, I don’t have a copy of the book, but I wonder if they have a digital wellness and/or citizenship section. I think these topics would need their own book as they are related to emotional and social well-being but are more in applying one’s emotional and social intelligence character strengths.

My current parents are very open to parenting guidance on wellness, the use of technology/media, and how their children interact with others via technology. I wonder if Common Sense Media has some form of workbook/journal for at-home use.

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Digital Wellness PERMAH Plan

As an instructional technologist, I always struggled with Responsible Use Policies (RUP). In many cases, they list a lot of behaviors the students should not do. There didn’t seem to be a positive approach around being creative, collaborative, proactive, in control of oneself, etc. And there was not so much buy-in because the students had no say in creating them. So I would give students the official school RUP to sign while making time to have them draw up their own personal responsible use policy, which involved what they could constructively do with technology. 🙂

Now that I am a counselor again and living in the constructive world of Positive Psychology, I think my approach was sound and could be designed using PERMAH and the Character Strengths. Did you notice that I used a few character strengths in the first paragraph? 😉 Yes, they can be applied to how our students and all of us engage in the digital world.

Previously I posted the idea of families designing their own tech and media agreements (Family Digital Wellness Plan) based upon their family values taking shape either as part of the family mission statement or as a separate document. I stand by that approach of having a family media agreement, but it could be enhanced by bringing PERMAH and the Character Strengths into the development process.

It might be too complicated for families to include this wellness approach in their discussions to create a family media/tech digital wellness and/or mission statement, especially with young children. I wonder if children and families might be offered a value-focused or a Positive Psychology approach. I will need to think about this, as both seem very solid.

I definitely see myself at some point working with students to use the PERMAH construct to create their personal digital wellness plan looking at how they will engage with technology and digital information to:

  • enhance their Positive Emotions
  • deepen their Engagement in activities
  • nurture aspects of their Relationships
  • offer them opportunities for Accomplishment
  • and grow their mental and physical Health

The process would also include listing which Character Strengths they will engage with within each PERMAH pillar.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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