Digital Safety Reflection

          In the classroom, incorporating technology entails a lot of safety issues. One of the major concerns I had last school year that hindered me from letting my students use their digital phone in the classroom is the possibility of textual harassment and sexting, cyberbullying, and losing focus on class discussions because of phone use. I was not aware that there are more to these safety issues than the most common I experienced in the classroom. Copyright issues, fair use practices, pharming, and phishing are some important additions to what I already know.

            In the science classroom, there are a lot of ways to incorporate the discussion of these safety issues in the Internet especially that I require my students to do several research papers on unit topics every quarter. I stressed to them that they have to always cite their sources. Nevertheless, there are more safety issues accompanying the use of Internet search than just the citations. The fair use rights for instance is a new safety issue for me and all the more for my students. I was able to find a video resource in YouTube, which you can view below, of how Novella Bailey, a middle school teacher in Westside Collaborative Middle School in New York City integrated the discussion of fair-use in her classroom. A similar strategy like this is what I plan to do in my science classroom next school year.

Source: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/understanding-fair-use-in-a-digital-world

          Furthermore I also feel the need to discuss copyright issues to my students, before even letting them cruise into the super high way of online searching as the book of Willard (2012) on being Cyber Savvy discussed: “Young people are cruising down the information superhighway with their accelerators fully engaged without sufficient braking power, while adults are struggling to get out of first gear.” I too has a share of these copyright infringement which I did without my knowledge. Below is a You Tube video on how to avoid violation of copyrights.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy48l8clMs0

           Another digital safety issue we discussed was about cyberbullying which our group was tasked to present on. In our presentation we used the tool, emaze. We assigned each group member parts to work on and created a public emaze account were all of us can edit and access. WhatsApp and Google Apps document sharing proved to be very efficient in our group work. We communicated with each other using these tools. We started with an outline in Google docs where we can edit our parts to fit to the entire group presentation. While creating the presentation, I learned a lot about it. Cyberbullying had been an issue since the rise of digital technology in 1960s but yet legislations in the US to address it was ratified only after 40 years (1999) in Georgia (see legislation timeline below). It is also interesting to note that the roles of bully and victim in cyberbullying are less evident than offline of traditional bullying (Vandoninck, D'haenens, & Segers,  2012). The boundaries between traditional bullying and cyberbullying are less clear-cut since some children report experience of both online and offline bullying as aggressors and /or vistims (Ibid). Cyberbullying prevention became harder because of these circumstances.

Source: http://zeliq.com/cyberbullying-laws-6.html

           Next school year apart from including the discussions of textual harassment, sexting, and cyberbullying, I will also include the information campaign about copyright issues, fair-use, phishing, and pharming. The prevention of making all these issues happen and best practices to follow are summarized in the video below. I think, there is also a need to educate students about computer virus and spyware, and how these affects the safety of their computer files and also their identity. 

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qR7LQUUDX0

References

Willard, N. (2012). Chapter 1: Let them teach each other how to swim. In Cyber Savvy: Embracing digital safety and civility. Corwin, A SAGE Publications Company.

Vandoninck, S., D'haenens, L., & Segers, K. (2012). Coping and resilience: Children's responses to online risks. Children, Risk and Safety on the Internet Research and Policy Challenges in Comparative Perspective, 205-218.