Friday, October 12, 2007

Safe Surfing


With news reports daily about online identity theft, accounts of people whose online profiles in social networks have kept their job applications from being considered and other Internet safety issues it behooves us to teach kids some strategies for staying safe online. Here are a few of the resources I use:

* Ewan MacIntosh's great article "We Can’t Teach the New Literacies Soon Enough"

CyberWise a site from the Government of Canada

* Internet 101

* LiveWires

* Be Web Aware

* Media Awareness Network This site is a gold mine of ideas for teaching all aspects of media awareness including topics such as bias.

* Surf Swell Island A Disney site for younger students.

Photo credits: Used under the Creative Commons licence granted by bionicteaching http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/; photo found at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1291097530&size=m

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Im also spending some time do these kind of lessons. Im also talking to kids about making good choices and ethically using information (since looming is the big research paper with required citations.) As a fun way to introduced copyright, we spent time talking about all the free music that is really illegally posted and illegally downloaded (and tho I did not ask, I could tell many right there in my school are using these sites--limewire, others). So it was with great joy that I printed an eschool article about a Minnesota woman who was recently convicted in a court of law, and ordered to payback $222K. (Yes I printed it and put it in teachers boxes--I don't think they would have rad it otherwise. I asked them to share with the kids. Many students have come to ask if its true. Of course we googled it and used our databases to show that indeed it was true. (Anything in Google is true, right??) THis is another area where our kids need instruction. Many were shocked to discover they were breaking the law.