This post is in response to Anne Mirtschin’s request for cybersafety resources for students. I’m currently out of the classroom, but for the past two years I’ve been teaming with our district webmaster to provide Internet safety workshops for teachers and administrators, who during the course of the 2-hour session often swap their teacher hats for their parent hats. Fortunately, the resources for students, teachers, and parents are plentiful and growing.

Here’s the opening slide from our PowerPoint. I like to start with the humor of the New Yorker cartoon*, quickly transitioning into the implications and realities of “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” by showing the Trevor’s Story video.

I’ll be adding Anne’s post as an example of how an elementary teacher prepares students for safe travels across the information highway.

Here are my top 10 Internet safety resources:

1. i-Safe - Sponsored by the US Dept. of Justice, i-Safe offers free online training and certification as an iSafe instructor, parent, or mentor. It takes about 5 hours to complete the certification, after which you’ll be familiar with all the iSafe resources, including the classroom lesson resources they’ll send in hardcopy.
2. iKeepSafe.org - Keep scrolling down the parent resource page and you’ll find excellent videos, including the What You Need to Know video. If I could direct parents to only one resource, it would be this video. It clearly explains the dangers of the Internet AND also makes a clear case for why Web 2.0 tools are important for 21st century students.
3. Pete Reilly’s article Facts about Sex Abuse and Schools - In addition to the stats that make clear that school is NOT where online predators are meeting up with students, I love his opening words: “In education circles the magical mantra has been ’student safety.’ The fear of online predators has been used to curtail, restrict, and prohibit the use of some of the most promising online educational technology tools. …” and his closing words: “As educational leaders we need to be safety conscious. We need to be prudent, reasonable; but we won’t live in fear and we won’t act from fear. It is by opening doors, not closing them, that we create new possibilities for our children and new futures for ourselves.”
4. Statistics from the Pew Internet and American Life Project - Why would a district block blogging, for instance, when the stats show that “Some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.”
5. Ideas for Integrating Internet Safety into the Curriculum - Kudos to the Virginia Department of Education for providing a model of how to align ideas for addressing Internet safety in the context of their state content standards for students.
6. Elk Grove Unified’s growing bank of resources - We continue to add resources and plan to reorganize soon by k-3, 4-6, 7-8, and 9-12 categories. Really, we were planning to do this before finding Virginia’s site:-)

7 - 10 Cyberbullying recourses - While we are certainly concerned about protecting students from online predators, the main focus of our program is to educate workshop participants about this heinous problem of cyberbullying, which unlike the old days when a bullied student could escape taunts once the school day ended, we recognize the seriousness and heart-wrenching consequences of 27/7 cyberbullying:

• NetSmartz’ Real Life Stories -My favorite video is Broken Friendship.
• Stop Cyberbullying - Provides excellent background information
• Spirit Desk’s Hero in the Hallway - This video is truly a K-12 resource. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the video link.

*Cartoon by Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 issue (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20) page 61

I really like the way the CTAP4 folks have organized resources for learning about and teaching all aspects of digital citizenship. They’ve included links to PowerPoints, workshop wikis, and even this wonderful poster. I think much of the credit for this valuable website goes to at&t’s Linda Uhrenholt.

I also appreciate Doug Johnson’s sharing his Cyberbullying and How to Avoid It student guide and poster - and Nancy Willard’s willingness to allow him to incorporate information from her website.  Doug will send the Word version to educators wanting to adapt the guide to meet their school or district’s guidelines.

And for our elementary students, I like McGruff’s Shrink the Cyberbully activity.

OK, in appreciation of all who are contributing resources to promote digital citizenship, I have one to give.  Many of the teachers and administrators attending my iSafety workshop ask for additional explanations of some the terminology that comes with Web 2.0.  I’ve been working with our district webmaster, who co-teaches the iSafety workshop, on developing a Cyberspace Glossary.  I can send the Word version to anyone who wants to tailor it for their own site.

For the last few days, a very sad story about educator Kathy Sierra has been moving across the blogosphere. A heinous story about threats made on her life, scary enough to cause her to cancel a keynote speech at a tech conference in California. In support and response, Andy Carvin has requested that today, March 30, all bloggers address cyberbullying in their posts.

It is because of cyberbullying that we need to fight poorly thought through legislation such as DOPA. It is unlikely that many parents are aware of or prepared to help their children understand the depth, breadth, and danger of cyberbullying. In fact, the definition of “digital divide” has changed. It’s not about low income schools not having access to computers and technology anymore. The new “digital divide” is the gulf between how parents think their children are using computers and the reality of how they actually are. More than ever, we need iSafety and Cyberethics to be part of the school curriculum.

Fortunately, there is a growing bank of good resources for educators and parents. I really like the selection available at Netzsmarts, complete with accompanying classroom activities. I also like Bill Beasley’s Cyberbullying.org and Nancy Willard’s Cyberbully.org - along with Nancy’s very complete white paper: An Educator’s Guide of Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats.

Posts this week by Eric Hoefler, Andy Carvin, and Vicki Davis offer insightful thoughts and resources, including the newly created Stop Cyberbullying social network, annotated guidelines for stoppying cyberbullying, and cyberbullying badges. It’s a sad to think that one voice has been silenced, but also encouraging to see how quickly the Web 2.0 community is rallying to lend support and find solutions.

Technorati Tags: stopcyberbullying

I thank Wes Fryer for adding another layer to the rationale for including blogging as part our classroom curriculum. If our students can show parents how their involvement in purposeful, monitored classroom blogging is engaging them - safely - in the learning process, parent perceptions about Web 2.0 will change.

“When a teacher establishes a safe, moderated classroom blogging environment using a tool like Class Blogmeister, s/he is not merely advancing the literacy development of students. The act of helping students safely blog over time in a moderated, public space tangibly advances a school reform agenda which includes changing adult perceptions of learning, especially as learning relates to and involves technology. “

Wes Fryer’s post follows last night’s outstanding Teachers Teaching Teachers session. Paul Allison emailed to a growing audience an invitation to join this weekly (usually) Skypecast for educators. His invitation included a link to Clarence Fisher’s post about dividing courses into components. Paul’s question to the TTT audience was “Do we need a separate class for blogging or is blogging an example of something that could be divided into components and re-assembled by a team of teachers at different times?

From Paul:

“Wouldn’t it be smart for a school to take the set of skills and habits of work that blogging requires/inspires and teach these alongside other curricula, instead of teaching them in isolation like many of us do now in New Media/New Journalism/Computer Technology elective courses? What if the teachers and administrators in a school were to treat blogging as a basic skill that needed to be taught in every grade, every semester. Can we imagine a scope and sequence for blogging that would stretch across the grade levels? This is exactly what some of us are beginning to be able to envision.

We are growing in our confidence to describe exactly what it means to teach blogging — and how it is different from what is taught now in even the best writing, media, and research classes. Those of us who have been teaching blogging as a course are beginning to be specific about what needs to be in a blogging curriculum. At the same time, many of us are not ready to go to the whole school and recommend this curriculum. We realize how much time, effort and thought must be devoted to blogging to see it become a truly meaningful and student-owned activity in school.

Perhaps it sounds contradictory, but it’s the vision of blogging going across the curriculum and into every grade that motivates some of us to be developing this curriculum in our own courses. We can imagine blogging being integrated into every teacher’s classroom, the way independent reading or vocabulary study is shared by teachers in many secondary schools. But we need a bit more time to develop the questions and exact components that seem important to blogging. “

I’ll end this post with one more argument for teaching blogging in the classroom: Pete O’Reilly’s post on child abuse and online predators.