Reading the Fine Print: Cyber Safety & More

I remember learning about cyber safety in elementary school by watching educational videos and reading different articles. I vaguely remember watching an interesting video in my grade eight class about the importance of reading the terms and conditions of apps and how easy it is to agree without reading because they’re so long and wordy. After searching, I was able to find the video produced by CBC News. I remember that after watching the video as a class, we had a huge discussion about how often we read the terms and conditions and then proceeded to go over several different app terms and conditions. After this, we were placed in groups, and over the next couple of weeks, each group chose a different area of internet safety to focus on. We had to create a presentation to give to some of the grades below us. I cannot remember the exact topic my group chose to do, but we recorded a short skit, created a Kahoot quiz, and then ended our presentation with some important information on our topic. Looking back now, I remember how intrigued I was when learning about cyber safety, and it made me more conscious about reading terms and conditions for apps.

From my experience, I found having multiple formats to learn about cyber safety and digital citizenship beneficial. Everyone learns differently, and while some people, such as myself, might like watching videos like the one I discussed above, others might find reading about the topic more beneficial. I like my teacher’s approach of making each group educate themselves on a specific area of digital citizenship and internet safety to teach others. This allowed us to do more research on our topic, produce content with accurate information, and then pass the information on to others. Thinking back to the assignment, I enjoyed the approach because I see the importance of allowing us as students to gather the information ourselves instead of just constantly sitting and taking notes.

I would consider educating my future students on digital citizenship by gathering information on how students use technology. This could be done through an online platform such as Mentimeter or Kahoot. Doing this would allow me to understand how my students interact with the internet and help me decide on key concepts to sprout our learning. I would then go through educating them on the basics of digital etiquette, digital footprint, and digital safety using the information I had gathered using different formats. After discussing those topics, I could do an activity where I could provide different scenarios regarding digital citizenship. The students could decide if the people in the scenarios are following good digital etiquette and safety or if they’re not following the proper etiquette and safety practices and explain why they are/aren’t and provide examples of how they could. I would want the students to be educated on the topic of digital citizenship in a way that keeps them interested but informed, as I felt in my own experience above.