Digital Literacy Has a Winning Weekend

(Cross-posted on iKeepSafe's Blog)

Project Tomorrow "Innovation in Education" Award Finalists

Last week in California, the 2014 Project Tomorrow Innovation in Education Awards were presented at the 21st Annual High-Tech Innovation Awards dinner reception. This high profile event, held in tandem with the O.C. Tech Alliance’s corporate awards, attracts over 300 business and community leaders each year. It recognizes corporations, schools, and individuals demonstrating innovative uses of science, math and technology in the classroom and community.


Our school, where I teach Cyber Civics (or, “digital literacy”), was a runner-up for this program and received a grant to expand it (the well deserved winner was the Jose Sepulveda Elementary School). Even though we didn’t win, we felt like winners nonetheless…simply because “digital literacy” was invited to the table. We were honored that Project Tomorrow and the OC Tech Alliance recognized the important contribution that digital literacy—knowing how to use digital tools wisely, competently, and safely— makes to the world of innovation.

Longtime digital literacy evangelist Glen Warren of McPherson Magnet School, who I met through working on iKeepSafe’s BE a PRO Digital Literacy program, was also a Project Tomorrow finalist. So for our mutual cause of digital literacy, it truly felt like a double-header.

Upon the heels of the Project Tomorrow gala, educators from several western states gathered for the Educating the Whole Child in the Digital Age Workshop at Journey School. They came to learn about our “innovative” three-year, middle school Cyber Civics program and how, and why, to take the lessons back to their own schools. I was honored to present alongside Waldorf educator, mentor, and cognitive development expert Patti Connolly, longtime media literacy educator Patty Page, and Cyber Safety Cop and online safety expert Deputy Clay Cranford.

Educators left the workshop enthused about sharing lessons on digital citizenship, information literacy, and media literacy with their own students, as one educator put it:

I’m inspired by the program, the brain research, and the critical thinking skills. I love the words cyber civics, ethical thinking, and social cognition. This workshop raised my awareness and I’m committed to adding this to the curriculum.

It was a great weekend, and as it turns out the real winners will be the students empowered with “innovative” digital literacy skills.

A Case for Cyber Civics

Cross-Posted on iKeepSafe's Blog.

My daughter, who is busy working on her college applications, received this message from her counselor yesterday:

“Just received an email from the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC)… a friendly reminder that colleges are reading your social media.”

Today, in addition to having a sky-high GPA and equally impressive test scores, kids also need to have a squeaky clean “digital footprint.” Unfortunately, by 12^th grade that “digital footprint” might as well be set in stone, it’s permanent and it started taking shape the day they posted their first picture on Facebook.

Last week I introduced the concept of the “digital footprint” to a sixth grade class just starting to use social media to define themselves to the world. Pretending they had to hire someone for a job at their school, students conducted “background checks” on potential candidates by studying each applicant’s social media accounts. What they learned through this exercise is that everything you say and post online, and everything other people say or post about you, becomes part of your “digital footprint.” This is the same digital footprint that college admissions officers will potentially see and judge them by; the same digital footprint that will help shape their future.

I’m fortunate to be able to spend an hour per week with grades 6-8 teaching CyberCivics. We cover important topics like online reputations, online safety, copyright, plagiarism, cyberbullying, and more. According to research conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, our kids are spending more time online than in school or with their families. So I was surprised to read in the L.A. Times earlier this week, this concern posed about teaching students lessons on “copyright”:

"While it's certainly a worthy topic of discussion with students, I'm sure some teachers would have a concern that adding anything of any real length to an already packed school day would take away from the basic curriculum that they're trying to get through now," said Frank Wells, spokesman for the California Teachers Assn.

That was a concern at our school too, however in the three years of our pilot program the school’s API (Academic Performance Index) score has risen steadily and significantly, despite the loss of “academic” time. It’s also given the administrator more time too, as incidences of “cyberbullying” and such that used to find their way into his office a couple times per week have virtually vanished since we started the program.

It's ironic that the prevailing attitude is that there is no time to educate students about their digital behaviors when it's these very behaviors that could prevent them from pursuing a higher education in the first place.

The CRAP Kids Learn in School

Cross-posted on iKeepSafe's Blog

Digital Media Literacy education is primarily a top-down endeavor: adults design curriculum based upon what they think kids should know about the digital world. It’s sort of like Martians deciding what Earthlings need to know about life on this planet. Sure we do our best, but at the end of the day many of us are still trying to sort out the difference between a text, a tweet, and a timeline. Additionally, while we generally cover the risk-prevention/online safety stuff well; we're not so good at imparting the skills that actually empower kids to use their digital tools masterfully.

So why not ask kids directly what it is they think they need to know?  Believe it or not, they will generally give you some very smart answers.  

For example, at the completion of a three-year pilot program in Digital Citizenship, Information Literacy, and Media Literacy at Journey School, what we call Cyber Civics, I asked the kids to tell me which lessons they found most valuable.

The overwhelming answer?  CRAP Detection. Yes I admit, that’s an acronym hard to forget. But it’s also an incredibly useful tool for finding the trees in a forest of online information. In short, CRAP Detection comes from the book, NetSmart: How to Thrive Online (2012) by Stanford University Professor, Howard Rheingold.  It suggests that we evaluate online information based on the following criteria:

Currency -

          -How recent is this information?

          -How recently has the website been updated?

Reliability

          -What kind of information is included in the resource?

          -Does the creator provide references or sources for data? Or quotations?

  Authority          

          -Who is the creator or author? What are their credentials?

          -Who is the publisher or sponsor? Are they reputable? 

            

Purpose/Point of View -

          - Is this fact or opinion? Is it biased?

          - Is the creator/author trying to sell you something?

The second two things the kids liked learning about most were Copyright and Plagiarism. Now this was surprising to me, because those aren’t topics you’d think an 8^th grader would remember fondly, yet as one student wrote,

“I liked learning about copyright rules so I don’t get arrested or kicked out of high school.”

Here are the other lessons the students liked most:  

“The most valuable thing I learned was to check to see if websites are trustworthy.”

“That every time you post something online it sticks onto your digital footprint like permanent glue.”

“That technology shouldn’t take over our lives.”

“That passwords should be around 8 characters w/symbols and numbers.”

“That people in magazines are photo-shopped and no one is perfect.”

And finally,

“Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your parents to see.”

Amen to that.

10 Tips for the New Year

If your child is like most, he or she is probably starting out the new year as the proud owner of a new digital device. A gift from you perhaps? If so, don’t let the gift-giving end there. Give the best gift of all: 10 TIPS to help them use their new phone, tablet, PC, laptop, or other digital tool wisely and safely:

1. Set Limits. Talk to your child about how to set appropriate limits for time spent with their digital devices. A good rule of thumb is to keep bedrooms device free at night (after homework) and to ban digital tools from the dinner table.

2. Manage Privacy Settings. If you haven’t already set the privacy settings on your own social networking sites, like Facebook, this is something you and your child can do together.  Decide who can see what they post online and how people can connect with them. Chances are you’ll both learn something in the process.

3. Read Privacy Policies. Yes, these can be long, dull and boring; but Privacy Policies are important to read, so try this: http://bit.ly/N5h14w. It reads privacy policies and user agreement for you and quickly scans them to flag words, statements, and phrases worth your attention.

4. Turn on the “Do Not Track Tool.”  Most Internet browsers have a "Do Not Track" tool to tell sites you don't want cookies installed on your device. In case you didn’t already know this, "cookies" are what websites drop on your computer to track your activities.  You can manage these by tweaking your preferences.

5. Have the Talk (about passwords). According to a Pew Internet Study, 1 in 3 teens have shared a password with a friend. Encourage your child to keep their passwords private and teach them how to make a strong passwords by following simple rules, like combining upper and lower case letters with numbers and symbols (and never include personal info!).  

6. Keep Personal Info Personal and Don’t Chat With or Send Photos to Strangers. The good news is that kids already know this. Research shows that adults actually share personal information more freely online than kids do. So here’s where we can work a little harder to be better online role models.

7. Ask Permission. Requiring your child ask permission before signing up for anything online is a good policy and it goes hand in hand with tip #8.

8. Be Vigilant. Teach your child how to recognize tricks and mechanisms the online world uses to try and access our personal data (like links on emails we don’t recognize). 

9. Respect Age Limits on SNS’s. Data shows that close to half of online teens admit to lying about their age in order to access a website. Just like we teach our kids to be ethical, law-abiding citizens of the offline world, show them how to extend these same behaviors into the online world. And remember that it’s smart to let kids develop the maturity needed to deal with the many ethical decisions that loom in cyberspace.

10. Finally, Give the Gift of Gab. Talk to your child. Chances are you’ll learn something from them about how to use your own devices more safely and wisely!

 Lastly, hopefully your child is lucky enough to learn some or all of these lessons in school. If not, why not advocate for digital literacy, cyber civics, and/or digital citizenship classes in your own school? It's a gift we could be giving to all our kids.

Cross-Posted on iKeepSafe Blog

10 Rules for Safe and Respectable Online Behavior (Written by 7th Graders)

                                                                                                    Photo by Nirzhar. Business Portraits

Here’s a question: Who is more apt to post an embarrassing photo online, a 7th grader or his/her parent? If you answered “a 7th grader”… then you’d be wrong. According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center called Reputation Management and Social Media, adults share personal information online more freely than kids. And guess what? They’d really like us to stop.

This past year, in our weekly “Cyber Civics” class at Journey School, I asked a roomful of 7th graders to come up with ten rules for “safe and respectable online behavior.” Here is their list:

1. I will not post embarrassing pictures of other people on public sites.
2. I will not post mean comments online.
3. I will not post any personal information about myself online.
4. I will not give out any personal information about my friends.
5. I will not make up fake identities.
6. I will always ask permission before posting pictures of others.
7. I will respect a person’s decision if they do not want a picture or video of themselves posted online.
8. I will think twice (or three times) before putting anything online.
9. I will not pretend to be another person online behind their back.
10. I will not post personal stories about my friends online without their permission.

I think these are terrific rules for all of us, young person and adult alike. After all, as tempting as it is to over share personal information on social networks, like Facebook, following these guidelines not only demonstrates respect for the “digital footprints” of our families and friends, it’s also just plain smart. After all, posting that photo of your family frolicking on the beach in Maui also broadcasts to the world that nobody is at home. That’s not so wise. Don’t believe me? Just ask your 7th grader.

(Btw, in case you were wondering, yes the class gave me permission to post this list and to give out the name of their school!)