Teacher guide

Curriculum Guide

Purpose, design, and how to run the Digital Citizenship Breakouts across grades K–8.

Build better online judgment with Digital Citizenship CTOBs — the CLEAR steps: Claim, Lens, Evidence, Alternatives, Response. Think before you click.

Purpose

The suite builds digital citizenship through reasoning. Every activity aligns to the Texas TEKS Technology Applications Digital Citizenship strand and its three substrands — social interactions; ethics & laws; and privacy, safety & security — but the deeper goal is critical thinking: students weigh evidence, reject a decoy, and justify each answer before they check it.

Why teachers love CTOBs: critical thinking (students weigh evidence; one clue is true but irrelevant; discussion replaces guessing), teacher-friendly (no logins; works whole-group, in partners, and in stations), accessibility and multilingual support, and curriculum support (pairs with TEKS, UDL, and ELPS). CLEAR makes learning visible: Claim, Lens, Evidence, Alternatives, Response.

The CLEAR thinking process

Each lock is designed so a correct guess is not enough — students should be able to explain the reason, which the activity reveals after every solve. That habit is the CLEAR thinking process, a simple critical-thinking checklist students can carry into any claim, message, or source they meet online:

C

Claim What exactly is being said?

  • Make the claim specific.
  • Make it testable.
L

Lens What assumptions am I bringing?

  • What do I already believe?
  • Am I reacting to evidence or past experience?
E

Evidence What supports the claim?

  • Strong: facts, data, direct observations
  • Weak: rumors, impressions
  • Missing: what do I still need to know?
A

Alternatives What else could explain this?

  • Consider other causes.
  • Consider other viewpoints.
  • Avoid oversimplifying.
R

Response What should I do now?

  • Ask a question · gather more information · challenge the claim
  • Document the issue · speak up · wait
Quick reminder: What do I think? Why do I think it? What might I be missing? What should I do next?

Every breakout is CLEAR practice: the six clues are the Evidence (some strong, some weak, one a true-but-irrelevant decoy); choosing which clue opens which lock forces students to name their Claim and check their Lens; the multi-select lock asks them to sort strong evidence from a plausible distractor; and the revealed reason after each lock models the Response. Push students to say why before they check — grade the reasoning, not the click.

Digital Citizenship CTOBs and the CLEAR framework. What is a CTOB: short clue-based investigations; students solve four locks using evidence; one clue is true but irrelevant; no logins and no data collection. CLEAR in action: 1 Claim (what is being said?), 2 Lens (what assumptions am I bringing?), 3 Evidence (what supports the claim?), 4 Alternatives (what else could explain this?), 5 Response (what should I do now?). Why it matters: builds safer online choices, strengthens reasoning not guessing, active learning, discussion and reflection.

How to deploy

  • Any device, any time. Each activity is one self-contained page — no install, no login, no data collected. Share the URL or embed it in your LMS.
  • Whole-class or independent. Project and solve together for younger grades; assign independently or in pairs for older ones.
  • Multilingual. The 🌐 picker offers English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and Chinese (translations are AI-seeded, pending native review).
  • Teacher pages first. Open the activity’s teacher launch page for the premise, standards, and classroom moves. It never shows answers.

Two lessons per grade

Free featured lessons — one per grade. Each grade has a fully-playable featured breakout on the home page. Use them with anyone, anywhere — no login, nothing collected.

The full per-grade lessons. The complete lesson for each grade (Grades K–8) is also free and open — same engine, same no-login, nothing-collected design. Every teacher page and this guide are open too.

Digital Citizenship CTOBs across the grades, using CLEAR to think through online choices. K–2: kind online behavior, simple passwords, digital footprints. Grades 3–5: group chats, private information, responsible sharing. Grades 6–8: phishing, clickbait, copyright, source credibility. CLEAR reflection routine: Claim, Lens, Evidence, Alternatives, Response.

Assessment

These are formative by design. Use the revealed reasons as discussion prompts, ask students to write the reasoning for the lock they found hardest, or have them author a new clue. The gated answer key lists every answer with its reasoning for your reference.

Grades 3–5 plan Grades 6–8 plan Correlation guide