The Responsibility of Teaching Digital Safety

       Last Friday I got my students started on social bookmarking with Diigo.  As I mentioned in my last blog, it was a great lesson.  Part of my excitement was due to how smooth the process went...I showed my students how to sign up for Diigo, join our group, and install and use Diigolet to bookmark and annotate web pages.   With very few questions, they caught right on.  It was the most seamless start up process for any web tool that I've used this year, and I wanted to think that this was due to how I had been successfull in teaching my students to navigate unfamiliar web pages on thier own.  

      Of course, when I began to pat myself on the back, I realized there was something that I hadn't considered.

      There is an important difference between the accounts students created for for Diigo and the other sites they've used: the Diigo accounts were public.  I mentioned this to students in my conversation with them about why social bookmarking could be advantageous, but I didn't address the limitations.  I didn't think I needed to.....that was until I began noticing that students were including personal information in the profiles they were setting up on Diigo...information about their identity and their personal lives, information that might be OK for them to share on our team's private social network, but not on a public space on the web. 
    
     I decided late last night that the lesson I had planned originally on Monday would have to wait a day.  We needed to talk about digital safety.

    To get the conversation started, I showed my students the following two videos and gave them time to write down their thoughts about them (thanks, Clif Mims for putting me on to these):



       After students had the time to write down their initial responses, I opened the floor for them to share what they thought.  The conversations took a different turn in each class, but each shared some common themes.  Most expressed that the idea of making smart decisions with one's personal information online was not news to them.  They've heard the message over and over.  They've seen To Catch a Predator, and know not to talk to strangers online.  But in our conversation, many students also expressed how they had never given much thought to people other than their intended audiences viewing what they put online.  This was especially true for information they may post on sites where they can restrict who has viewing access.  Most of our conversation focused on how this "private" information could still get out and how easy it would be for it to travel quickly across the Internet....possibly into the hands of people like the guy selling movie tickets (in the first clip).
       With these thoughts in mind, I gave students time to go back to the accounts they've set up in school (both private and public), and revise their profile and account information.  All were anxious to revisit their profiles, examining their words and images closely....even the students who claimed that they were experts of online safety.

       I'm glad that I decided to make time for this lesson.  It wasn't spectacularly planned, and it didn't take much class time, but it was and absolutely necessary.  Both the students and I assumed that online safety is common sense, but as we've come to see, it's not.  We needed to have the conversation that started today, and it's even more important that I allow it to continue the rest of this year.

       My students, as digital learners, deserve nothing less.

Using Technology to Support a Great Critical Media Literacy Lesson

This week started off fairly low tech; I showed students a VHS tape of an old (but classic), black and white episode of the Twilight Zone.  The episode, titled  "The Eye of the Beholder"  brought about an interesting conversation about the nature of "beauty" and the factors that influence our understanding of it.  The discussion served to raise plenty of questions and a variety of opinions,  but as a class,  students only found a couple areas of consensus....one, that there is no one set standard for beauty, it varies from person to person; and two, that our environment influences what we perceive as being beautiful.  One influence that students identified as being most significant was the images we see in the media.

With those ideas in mind, students brought in magazines and examined the characteristics of the people shown in the advertisements, making lists of the characteristics we noticed of the men and the women featured in the ads.  These characteristics students typed into a Google Form I embedded on my website, enabeling me to paste these characteristics into a Wordle  (shown below).  The next day, students begain class by gluing these word clouds into their daybooks and writing about what they thought they revealed.

For Men:                                                                         For Women

After briefly discussing the thoughts these Wordles elicitited, we then watched and wrote responses from the following video from Dove:




As you could imagine, this sparked quite a bit of discussion, and with that discussion, more questions.....We decided that something wasn't right....that our perception of beauty was based upon seeing people that were edited by computers.  But we just couldn't figure out what consequences this reality of our society might have and why advertisers did this.

So, when we couldn't arrive at the conclusions we needed through discussing and putting our heads together, we looked outside of our classroom walls...to the web! 

Before students went to the web, though, I first introduced them to a tool that would make our search more collaborative and effective: social bookmarking.  Students created accounts on Diigo, then joined a class group that I had created.  I gave them an overview of how social bookmarking works and a brief tutorial about how to use the tools offered by Diigo and save websites to our group. 
      *NOTE: Teaching new technology always take a little time, but the lessons I learned from my previous post still held true today.   I also took an additional step this week of creating screencasts on Screentoaster of the steps I woudl be demonstrating and embedding them on my website, so students could refer to them if they got stuck. 

Armed with this awesome new web tool, students took to the web to find out what they could about advertising, the media, teens' self-image, and society's perception of beauty.  This is a huge topic, but with 70 of us working together and collaborating on Diigo, we managed to find over 50 sites on the topic and converse across classes about the information that we found on them:

Our new understanding and the information that we found is going to lead us into next week.  Starting Monday, students are going to get their own blogs started on Blogger and begin crafting their first posts, in which they will write about their opinions relating to self-image and the media.  Within these posts, I'll also introduce students to the digital composing skill of hyperlinking, enabling them to include links in their writing back to the information we found this week.