Week 3

The Protection of Students Online

After discovering the fantastic learning opportunities technology has to offer us over the past couple of weeks, this week highlighted the dangers the internet can also pose for students.

In the weekly lecture, Greg directed us to the Cybersmart website. The website was developed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, as part of the Australian Government’s cybersafety program.

http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/.

Cybersmart provides activities, resources and practical advice to help young kids, teens and parents to enjoy the online world safely.

The Cybersmart website also houses a wide range of cybersafety information and teaching resources for primary and secondary schools. These accessible and engaging materials are designed to help schools develop and implement a holistic approach to cybersafety. 

The 'Young Kids' section features a great reminder of the key concepts of staying 'cyber smart' for children.  I think this would make a good poster to display in the classroom for the teacher to regularly direct the children to.

The lecture went on to make an interesting distinction between 'behavng responsibily' and 'behaving safely' online.

 Behaving safely referred to students: 

• protecting their own privacy and personal information 
• selecting appropriate spaces to work and contribute 
• protecting the privacy of others 
• being proactive in letting someone know if there is something that is 'not quite right'

 
These were the usual protocols I would have expected to find.  However, behaving responsibly put the emphasis on the student to use the internet ethically; in ways I hadn't thought of before.

Behaving responsibly requires students to:

• use appropriate language
• consider the things they say
• treat others with respect
• respect peoples property (e.g intellectual and copyright)
• visit appropriate places 

During the lecture, Greg played us some excellent videos from Youtube with themes of cyber bullying and internet safety.  This had me wondering if there were any videos aimed at lower primary school aged children.  I found the one below and was very pleased with myself as I didn't know how to embed it into this blog, but now I had the ICT confidence to explore the 'help' facility on the Youtube website.  Unfortunately it cuts off towards the end but the full version would be good to use with preps to Year 2.

For older students, I would use the video below produced by the The Department for Education in the UK.  The programme examines a focus group of children who helped shape the report. We hear their thoughts on the 'Zip It, Block It, Flag It' motto as well as what they think about internet safety in general.

Workshop Quia games

In the workshop we looked at the Quia website.  Quia stands for Quintessential Instructional Archive.  It provides a wide range of tools including:

• templates for creating online activities such as: flash cards, battleships, hangman, word search, cloze activities, surveys etc.
• online quizzes which also give you the students' results
  
• and access to over 3 million online quizzes and activities in 300 categories. 

I think the brilliance of Quia is that it lets you personalise activities.  You could create a quiz on any subject that you have been studying with students.  It would be a fun activity in class but also a great benefit in assessing students understanding in an informal way.

Quia also engages students who like to use computers.  It moves away from traditional 'black line markers' to a more engaging medium for children.