Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2026 Newsletter
AI-Powered Media Education for Responsible Digital Citizens with eTwinning by Daisy De Gioannini
How can schools prepare young people not only to use artificial intelligence, but also to understand, question, and shape the digital world they inhabit? This question inspired our eTwinning project, Safe & Smart Online: Skills4Life, an international collaboration involving students from Italy, Spain, Hungary, Serbia, and Jordan. By integrating AI into media education and digital citizenship, the project empowered students to become critical thinkers, creative communicators, responsible collaborators, and active citizens.
What makes this project particularly innovative is its combination of digital literacy, project-based learning, artificial intelligence and international cooperation. Rather than using AI simply as a technological tool, students learned with AI, about AI, and through AI, developing the competences they need to participate responsibly in an increasingly digital society.
The project was designed around a pedagogical model that mirrors the Triadic Loop of AI-Mediated Digital Citizenship: Surfacing, Reframing, and Producing.
During the Surfacing phase, AI helped students make invisible digital behaviours visible and discussable. Through AIgenerated avatars, chatbots, thinking routines, and collaborative inquiry, students explored concepts such as digital footprints, FOMO, doomscrolling, phubbing, cyberloafing, trolling, cyberbullying, and online privacy. By naming and analysing these everyday experiences, they developed the vocabulary and awareness necessary for critical media literacy.
The second phase, Reframing, transformed personal experiences into shared civic concerns. Through videoconferences, collaborative discussions, Padlet activities, and intercultural dialogue, students compared perspectives across five countries. They discovered that responsible online behaviour is not merely an individual choice but a collective responsibility requiring empathy, respect, and intercultural understanding.
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