Thanks to much support from my district (especially Tech Services and Communications) and a partnership with the US Attorney’s Office, my 2WebWatchers partner, Kathleen Watt, and I were able to spend the December 16 School Board meeting recognizing a group of students for their entries in our First Annual Internet Safety Video Contest. The winning entries and honorable mentions are uploaded and posted, so check it out!

If you are considering putting together a similar event for your school district, I encourage you in your efforts and invite you to contact me with questions and suggestions. You are also very welcome to adapt our contest flier, entry form, and guidelines (posted on 2WebWatchers) to suite your event. We tailored the guidelines to meet SEVA 2009 guidelines.

Based on this year’s event, we’ll tweak next year’s entry form to include the sponsoring teachers’ names – but still allow, even encourage, entries from independent filmmakers such as the talented, dedicated Tori W. (who has moved from 8th grade to 9th, still without being able to enroll in a video production class). We’ll also require a typed list of student names, rather than attempting to decipher names from handwritten entries. And the last tweak will be the requirement that all videos are submitted as a CD so that we can easily pull snippets for an Awards Night montage – unless we can find a software program that makes working with DVDs less of a hassle.

If you already have a similar event in place or know of other districts that are sponsoring Internet safety video contests, I would love to include your links on 2WebWatchers!