Cyber-Citizenship: A Challenge of the Twenty-First Century Education

The twenty-first century’s global and technological society, full of information, requires reframing the concept of citizenship and the responsibilities of its citizens, particularly in the school context. It is important to promote the development of children and young people for their integration as active and critical citizens in the local and global communities in which they live in. As such, current education has a duty to educate for cyber-citizenship, that is, the duty to initiate children and young people in the use of new information and communication technologies, in order to understand the global reality in which they live in and to encourage them to intervene and to participate autonomously and responsibly. In this article, we reflect on the need for schools to educate cyber-citizens, analyzing and discussing how educators and teachers view new information technologies in the promotion of citizenship education, in order to understand whether educators and current teachers use the new technologies and communication in the promotion of citizenship, feel prepared to promote cyber-citizenship and already do so in their educational context. We note that cyber-citizenship is still not a current school reality.