Challenge
I have seen an incredible chasm in terms of student behaviour in online spaces and a direct correlation with mentorship. Sometimes this is teacher-student mentorship and other times it is student-student mentorship. A Common Sense Media study in 2018 reported that from 2012 to 2018 there was an increase from 34% to 70% of students aged 13 to 17 who used social media multiple times a day (Rideout & Rob, 2018), and yet, social media was only being used in 13% of classrooms according to a nationally representative sample of 1208 U.S. K-12 teachers in 2019 (Vega and Rob, 2019). Although digital citizenship programs are becoming better at supporting students, they still focus primarily on what not to do. I want to create a space for students to see other students as role models and mentor each other to use technology and social media in positive ways.