ETL523 Activity 2

Activity #2 ETL 523

Exploring and discussing relevant resources for your needs

Review two or more of these sites and consider how useful they may be to you and/or your school in developing an approach and a curriculum for digital citizenship:

Cyber Safe Kids: An online resource for children and parents (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cybersafekids.com.au

This site is useful because it has been designed for an Australian audience of both parents,, teachers and children.

The Advice Sheets are a very practical part of the site.They include information about cybersafety, bullying and cyberbullying. They have sheets aimed at adults, primary aged and secondary aged children.

In some ways it could be more explicit in its explanations about certain topics. For example, in the article about Online Grooming ( “Online Grooming”, n.d. parar.8) it mentions security settings without explaining what they are or how to change them. This could be confusing to some parents.

Despite this, the teaching resources are explicit and adaptable. They are genuienly aimed at all year levels and can be adapted to any lesson containing digital content. These resources can be found at Cyber Teach Toolkit – Safe and Responsible Use of Digital Technologies (Cyber Teach Toolkit – Safe and Responsible Use of Digital Technologies, 2013). They could be used at my school as a set of tools to use when teaching using digital technologies. As my school is moving towards BYOD, digital citizenship will need to be taught in the classroom on an ongoing basis.

The other site that I am reviewing in this post is iCyberSage.com – Living in a connected world (2014). Retireved from http://icybersafe.com

This website is a good way for parents of our school community to keep up with current trends in the world of social media. In a primary school, such as ours, the sites they discuss probably are not being used by our children. However, it would provide the tools for the parents to know what their younger children are doing and what their older chidlren are doing. Although it is mostly aimed at parents of teenagers it does have some articles and links for these parents. On the whole, this website is more useful for parents of teenage children, and as such, it would  be one of a group of websites that I would recommend to parents of primary aged children. That is, it as it not aimed specifically at younger children, it would need to be grouped with other sites for it to be sufficiently useful to our parent body.