Nate Naasz

As a teacher at Lincoln Junior/Senior High School in Kansas, I am honored to be able to write a guest blog post on the EverFi blog! We have been fortunate to use Ignition – Digital Literacy and Responsibility course for the past two years. We feel that this program is so important to the success and safety of our students that we make sure that each of our 8th graders gets certified on Ignition before they move on to high school.

Integrating Ignition into my Computer Applications course has been a very easy process as we’ve been focused on teaching digital literacy. Ignition alone replaced all the programs we had been using and even added additional content that was not being covered. Furthermore, the students actually enjoy the lessons as they can work at their own pace and can select the order of the lessons, which gives them more control over their education.

The courses are very relevant to the digital lives that most of our students are being raised in, from choosing a computer or a cell phone plan, to learning how to communicate responsibly on social media, to learning about careers in technology.

As an instructor, I particularly like that Ignition requires the students to take each assessment until they achieve mastery with a minimum score of seventy percent. This ensures that every student has a firm grasp of the content and will be able to apply the lessons into their daily digital decision-making.

To reinforce the significance of becoming certified on Ignition, we recognize and celebrate students receiving their certificates by having a graduation ceremony. For the coming year, we’re looking forward to having the principal of the school preside over our next award ceremony.

Without tools like Ignition we would not be preparing our students properly for a life lived on the digital frontier.

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Nate Naasz, MAEd, is the sole Business & Computer Instructor at Lincoln Jr/Sr High
School in rural Lincoln, KS.