Up
in Moray (New Elgin Primary School, I think?) they have invested in some new
secure cycle storage.
Then,
instead of leaving the old bike sheds to become ‘dead space’ they
have turned the area into a simple traversing wall for the children to play and
climb on.
It is undercover as well – so you can even climb in the rain (something
that you have to get used to living in Scotland!).
How might you use a bit of paint to brigten up some of those dark and boring spaces in your school grounds?
Sponsored by Facebook
I did some work recently for the EUN where we looked at the role of Social
Media in Learning and Education (SMILE). One of the outputs of my
contribution to the project was a professional development eLearning course for
European Teachers and Head Teachers on the use of Social Media in Schools.
As this part of the
course has now finished (and we have gone into the community development phase)
I am re-posting a version of the materials here so others can benefit from
them.
This is part 5 of 6 - Internet Safety and Responsible Use
Internet Safety and Responsible Use:
The Course Notes and Links
1. Internet Safety and Responsible
Use
Whenever we talk
about Internet Safety we must also talk about Responsible Use. Similarly, when we talk about the safe use of
social media we must also talk about the
responsible use of social media.
Unfortunately
some people still believe that the only way to keep children safe online is to ‘lock and block’ access to parts of the
Internet though web filtering. The reality of this is that this doesn’t remove
the actual dangers (perceived or
otherwise) and it also makes it almost impossible for educators to deliver
key Internet Safety and Responsible Use messages.
The fundamental
requirement to keeping children and young people safe on-line is to make sure
that they have received an appropriate education in how to use tools and
services appropriately. They also need
to understand the wider issues of privacy and how to report if they experience
something they do not feel comfortable with.
The Cloud
Learn Research Report from Heppell.net and the Nominet Trust provides a useful insight to UK
schools who have started to challenge the culture of ‘locking and blocking’.
2. Understanding Terminology
One important
consideration of any aspect of Internet Safety and Responsible Use, including
the responsible use of social media, is terminology. If we want to help keep
children and young people safe on-line we must all be speaking the same
language and this should include an understanding of tools and services that
children and young people use.
When exploring
tools and services it is important that adults ask what websites children use,
but also how they use the website and what the website is used for. Only by
understanding the purpose of social media tools will we be able to offer
children and young people appropriate advice and support to help them stay
safe.
The meaning of a
word ‘friend’ is an interesting
example of how technology may be changing language over time. A friend to an
adult is likely to be someone they trust, someone they are happy to meet for a
coffee, someone they are happy to invite to their house etc… Yet a friend to a
young person may just be a connection on a social networking space. Establishing a common language is really
important.
This YouTube
Video illustrates nicely how technology has changed language over time - http://goo.gl/umcQX - its also pretty funny!
3. Privacy
Language is also really important
when it comes to the term ‘privacy’.
Recent research such as the Pew Internet
Report suggests that young people are more concerned about
privacy than ever before. However, although many young people will tell you
they are concerned about their privacy on-line very few young people can actually tell you what privacy is. It's a
good example of young people telling you what they want you to hear, rather
than actually understanding the meaning of what you are asking.
In Europe we
have laws that protect our privacy but the reality of it is lots of people just
give their data away. Other people (including our friends on social networks) also
give data / information about other people away as well.
We often just don't know what we have signed up for when we 'tick' the
small print at the bottom of the terms and conditions of a new Social Media
Service. Helping young people understand
terms & conditions, privacy and what privacy setting means is an important
aspect of keeping young people safe on-line.
4. Digital Footprints
Digital
footprints are the digital trail that you leave behind you on the Internet
whenever you comment on a blog; share something on a social networking space;
or up-load an image or video. Other people can also contribute to your digital
footprint by up-loading things about you that are linked to your name or
profile. An example of this might be when you appear in a newspaper that is
then digitised or a friend ‘tagging’ a photograph of you on Facebook.
The majority of
people have got a digital footprint these days (even if they don’t know it yet!) and almost all young people will
have a digital footprint that will get bigger as they get older. Digital
footprints are not something that we can stop but we need to make sure a young
persons digital footprint leaves a good impression. This is particularly
important when it comes to employability where increasing employers are looking
at the social networking profiles of perspective employees as well as job
application forms.
One important
emerging trend is that many very young children have got digital footprints.
These are footprints that have often been created by their parents. This is
backed up by an interesting
piece of research on the AVG Blog which found:
The
average age at which a child acquires an online presence courtesy of their
parents is at six months, and by the time they are two 81% of children
have some kind of ‘digital footprint’.
A
third (33%) of children have had images posted online from birth
A
quarter (23%) of children have even had their pre-birth scans uploaded to
the Internet by their parents
Seven
per cent (7%) of babies have even had an email address created for them by
their parents
More
than 70% of mothers said they posted baby and toddler images online to
share with friends and family
The important
consideration here is that we must make sure that parents receive information
about responsible behaviour on social networking sites. This has to include
education into the potential implications of creating digital footprints for
their children.
Resources like
the Internet Archive Wayback Machine can be useful in helping young people
understand that it is almost impossible to delete anything from the Internet.
Internet Safety
and Responsible Use needs to be included in your Social Media Policy. But even
more important than this is acknowledging the Internet and other Digital
Technology in your schools Child Protection and Learning & Teaching
Policies.
I will look at
creating a Social Media Policy in more detail in my next blog post.
6. Social Media on the Curriculum
When trying to
include social media in the curriculum it is important to emphasise that Social
Media is just another tool that teachers can be use to motivate students and to
enhance the teaching process.
One way that we
can encourage young people to behave responsibly when using social media is for
teachers to model the responsible use of social media tools during their normal
classroom practice.
Teachers can put
structures in place to help support learners in the use social media which
involve modelling behaviour, working jointly with children, developing rules
and eventually leading to independent learning (supported by social media
tools) that is built around a classroom culture of trust and respect.
There are also a
number of resources to help teachers in Europe to deliver key messages around
Internet Safety and Responsible Use. The European InSafe Network is a great place to start looking for resources to
support you with your teaching.
I posted the Move film earlier today which has some obvious links to geography, place and international education. But the 3 guys who traveled, 38 thousand miles, over 44 days, through 11 countries and 18 flights to create the films also made two more.
I think is great as well. The first part is perfect for identifying and talking about stereotypes with a class of learners and the whole film who be perfect to support teaching a unit on the geography of food.
Over the past few months I have been doing more work around Internet Safety and Responsible Use for Parents and Teachers. Quite a bit of this work involved speaking at conference, running professional development for teachers and engaging with parent focus groups.
The work is very important but it can also be quite repetitive so to try and help this and to reach as many people as possible we recently made three films that covers some of the content that I normally address in various talks.
I feel it contains the minimum amount of content and information needed for all parents and education professionals.
As well as covering some of the issues regarding Internet Safety and Responsible Use it is designed to try and get people thinking about how do we tackle some of these big issues at home and in school.
As always I would be very keen to find out what you think of the resource as I hope to up-date it on a 6 - 12 monthy basis.
In this brief clip from the BBC's "Bang Goes the Theory," Dr Yan narrates a timelapse of food rotting over several days. I agree with the guys at Boing Boing in that,
'My favorite part is the exclamation of genuine delight when the maggots decamp from the minced beef and head for the fruit'.
Now a question, at what level within the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence would it be appropriate to use this video?
My two great education passions are learning through technology and learning through the outdoors. Not everyone will agree but I think the two have great parallels.
The Growing Greener Futures conference is hosted by Holy Trinity Rosehill Primary School and supported by Creativity, Culture & Education, will be a major gathering event for educators interested in developing creative learning approaches through the great outdoors and digital technologies.
"The conference will explore outdoor learning through the themes of gardening, conservation, cooking, sustainability and digital technologies. Delegates will have the opportunity to experience keynote presentations from nationally recognised experts in the field as well as participate in hands-on and thought-provoking workshops throughout the day.
This is not only an excellent opportunity to attend an outdoor learning themed conference but also network with other professionals about creating and shaping an outdoor curriculum of excellence".
The philosophy of the conference really fits in with some of the work that we have been doing up in Scotland over the last 12 months surrounding outdoor learning.
Martin tells me there are still a few places available – find out more here.
One of the parts of the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events was to let delegates have an opportunity to read over the relatively new Curriculum for Excellence Through Outdoor LearningDocument. I personally think that this is one of the best Curriculum for Excellence documents that has been produced so far.
The core values of Curriculum for Excellence echo the key concepts of outdoor learning: challenge, enjoyment, relevance, depth, development of the whole person and an adventurous approach to learning.
Curriculum for Excellence also offers opportunities for all children and young people to enjoy first-hand experience outdoors, whether within the school grounds, in urban greenspaces, in Scotland’s countryside or in wilder environments.
Such experiences inspire passion, motivating our children and young people to become successful learners and to develop as healthy, confident, enterprising and responsible citizens.
If you have not read the document you should even if you are a school from outside Scotland. You can view it online here and download it here.
One of the best features of the new site is the section on ‘where to go?’ in this section you can type in your schools address or postcode and it will list some of the outdoor learning opportunities that are close to your school using a Google Map.
This is a last of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinions and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.
The last technology (in this series) that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is technology that will end privacy and at the moment I think that is social networking. I first talked about this in my Keynote to delegates at Edinburgh University on Digital Technology, Children and Young People in May 2010. Let me explain my thinking.
I don’t think privacy really exists any more. I know that in the UK we have laws that protect us against certain things but the reality of it is lots of people just give there data away and also data about other people as well. We just don't know we are doing - even though we have agreed to it when we 'tick' the small print.
I know that the Pew Internet Report suggests that young people are more concerned about privacy than ever before. But I don’t think the majority of young people in Scotland actually understand what we mean by privacy or on-line privacy (they are of course the same thing).
For example, if you asked an 11 year old if they were concerned about privacy, I think they would probably say, ‘yes’. If you asked them to define it, I think they might struggle? Of course I could be wrong – my only real research into this is personal observation and asking my 11 year old next door neighbor!
Lets take Facebook as an example. First of all we need to appreciate the amount of people that actually used this social networking site. In the UK at the time of writing its 44.4% of the population (or 58.12% of UK Internet users). If you don't think this is significant - think about the percentage of the population that voted at the last general election.
It doesn't matter if it is Facebook or the 'big' social networking site that comes next. The percentage of people using web and mobile based social networking will continue to increase as these services evolve over time.
One of the reasons for this is that for young people being part of a digital social network will become normal behavior(if it hasn’t already). This will probably continue to a point where you will actually be at a significant disadvantage if you are not part of a social networking space. The second reason is that most people now have the skills to access social networking spaces as the tools have become so easy to use and there is also a real purpose to do it for many people (eg: keeping in touch with your children and your grand children).
(ABOVE:Graph Showing Male / Female User growth for Facebook UK - source)
You are meant to be 13 years old or over to use facebook but we know that there are many children a lot younger than this who use the social networking space. Those children who have not grown into Facebook yet often occupy and use other social spaces on the Internet. Many of these are virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Mosi Monsters, Seapals, etc…
I’ll come back to virtual worlds in a separate post on Internet Safety and Responsible Use. But I think it is important that we acknowledge that many virtual worlds are also social networking spaces where information can be shared and given away. The diagram below shows just how many virtual world social networking spaces there are for young people. Did you know there were so many? Do you know which ones the children in your school inhabit?
Returning to Facebook. It is interesting to look at how Facebook default privacy setting have changed over time the diagram below shows 2005:
The next one is 2007:
The next one is 2009 (Dec):
And the final one is 2010 (April):
Here is the interesting thing. If you were an early adopter of Facebook your profile is probably quite secure as your privacy settings will not have changed very much unless you have purposely changed your profile to make it less private. Later Facebook adopters are more likely to have a less secure profile partly because later adopters could be less digitally literate and partly because most people just accept the default settings (and also don’t read the small print!).
This is fine but there are still a few problems with this in terms of children and young people. The first is that children still don’t understand the privacy settings because the language is not very accessible and the second thing is that it is not very ‘cool’ to make your profile private. This isn’t Facebooks fault (remember the site is for people aged 13 and over).We have a youth culture and education issue here and not a Facebook problem.
Now lets think of an example where a young person is using Facebook. They have their profile locked down so that it is not available on the public web. That’s great but quite often parts of their profile can still be accessed by people because they allow their ‘friends’ to access it.
The thing some people forget is that technology continues to change language.
Look at this picture below and think about what you see:
A lot of people (maybe not you)will see a ‘digital camera’ a 7 year old will see a ‘camera’.
It’s the same with 'friends'. A friend on a social networking space to a young person may not be someone they trust, know or have even met. A friend to many young people is just a connection. But if you are friends with that person, they can probably see your profile and access your photographs, favorites etc… The sames goes for friends of freinds.
In fact even if you are not a member of facebook there might be photographs of you on it. These photographs have been tagged by another person with your name and are now associated with your name and your picture and might be available on the public web (you have just become googleable…).
Photos are interesting because as soon as there is a photograph of you on the web then it is possible to look for ‘similar photographs’ and with every similar photograph there will be a bit more information to help build up your digital profile.
So what does this mean for schools and education?
First of all it means that the concept of teaching young people about digital footprints has to become a core part of our curriculum. But the only way that we are going to be able to do this is by making sure that teachers understand the concept of digital footprints and the impact that social networking technology will have on society (note i said will have - we won't be able to stop this).
Some people reading this post will think what I have suggested is scary and they will say, ‘that’s why I am not on facebook’. These could be some of the most dangerous people in the context of media literacy. If you are not on or have never been on facebook it is very unlikely that you will be able to educate young people about the possible risks of using technology. It is more likely that you will say, 'don't use it,' which young people will never do.
One thing is for sure. More and more people will continue to use technology like this and the people that don’t use it will become less and less. But, as more and more people sign up to the web to live, work and play - there becomes more and more data for other people to see, store, borrow and manipulate.
I was walking through the park in Lethbridge, Alberta a couple of weeks ago and became fascinated by what I thought were very strange looking litter bins.
It was quickly pointed out to me that in fact they were ‘golf holes’ designed to be used with a Frisbee or a disk. Apparently ‘disk golf’ is pretty popular in USA and Canada – but I had never heard of it before.
When I took these pictures it was a rainy day but when I drove past a few days later there were loads of people playing it on a Sunday afternoon (some people even had different colored disks designed to be thrown different distances!).
What I thought was good about it was how an activity like this could really add values to a public space. I also wondered how easy it would be to re-create this activity on school playing fields or open spaces near schools.
Courses wouldn’t need to be permanent like the one that I saw in Canada – you could easily set up temporary ones or have the children design their own course using their local surroundings. The cost to a school buying twenty Frisbees is very cheap compared to an investment in other sporting equipment.
Interestingly, there are actually a few permanent disk golf courses in the UK and Ultimate Frisbee is also a pretty popular activity at Universities.
The idea of engaging young people in ‘hybrid sports’is one that really fascinates me. Louise Jones was telling me about ‘Cage Cricket’ a few months ago and again I think that this would be really popular with young people.
Have a look at the YouTube video below if you have not heard of Cage Cricket before.
This is a fourth of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinions and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.
Augmented reality (or at least my understanding of it) is a way that we can lay virtual data or images on top of real images. It has been around for years but again has only recently become more robust and cost effective. I mentioned augmented reality recently in a post about how such technology may allow relatively unskilled people to easily do the jobs of people who currently need to be skilled.
Have a look at the BMW Research Concept Video (YouTube Video below) to see what I mean:
I think that this type of technology may be particularly appealing for some industries as it could be more cost effective but also safer and less of a risk for employees.
We are still a little way off Augmented Reality glasses – this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist (they do!) they are just a little bit expensive at the moment and normally have to be plugged into a computer to work robustly.
However many people have an augmented reality viewer already in their pocket – their mobile phone (a recurring theme of this mini series!).
Modem smart phones know exactly where they are because they have GPS in them. They know which way they are facing because they have an accelerometer and / or digital compass in them. They also have a camera and large viewing screen so you can easily see the world though them. Finally, as long as you have a 3G signal most modern smart phones are constantly connected to the Internet – making them very powerful mini computers.
There are already lots of augmented reality / layer apps available for the iPhone and for the android platform. The new Android commercial shows some of the possibilities of this technology (YouTube clip below).
The potential is huge. Imagine walking down the high street and you are looking for somewhere to eat, you walk past a restaurant, hold up your phone to the restaurant and the latest customer reviews appear around it. Or, you go on a history field trip to a famous battle field and by holding up your phone you can actually see a re-enactment of the battle take place. Or, what about if you visited and extinct volcano (such as Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh) and you hold up your phone to see the geological information about the volcano or even what it might have looked at millions of years ago.
The potential for augmented reality in gaming is also huge. As part of out work at Learning and Teaching Scotland we have already put Sony Eye Pets for the Play Station 3 into a number of Early Years establishments(more about this in a separate post) and also have Invizimals and second sight for the PSP ready to go out to some partner schools early next session. The interesting thing about all of these games is that they use the ‘real world’ as the backdrop for immersive game play.
I’m convinced that these ‘real world’ augmented games will be the big thing of 2011 – 2012 and devices like the Parrot AR Helicopter will add to this new phase of game play. The Parrot helicopter is a hover helicopter with two cameras on it so that you can see what the helicopter sees. The amazing thing about the Parrot helicopter is that you control it over WiFi with your iPhone (and probably other devices as well).
All of these applications are interesting but the real point of my post is to think about what will happen when you combine augmented reality technology with facial recognition software.
Facial recognition software has been around for years and just like all technologies its got better and cheaper over the last few years as computing power has increased. If you’re a mac user facial recognition has been built into the last few versions of iPhone (that ships with all apple computers).
Google image search also now includes an option to search for just faces and Google Picassa allows you to do the same thing with your own photos that you have up-loaded.
In fact Google has had a real interest in facial recognition for years – this is one of the reasons why they bought Neven Vision back in 2006.
Now lets take all the parts and add them together to think about what will be possible in the not to distant future.
There are lots of people globally up-load pictures of themselves to the Internet, these pictures are often associated and tagged with the persons first and last name.
There are also a number of websites that allow web users to aggregate all of their social content to one place (Google Profile and Facebook are both good examples of this).
There are already websites that can build a profile of you from an email address, depending on what you have published about yourself on-line. If you don’t believe me check out spokeo – it scares me!
Also, in the UK (and probably other parts of the world as well) unless you are ex-directory (which we recommend all teachers are) then your address and phone number (including your mobile phone number) are all stored online.
What is my point? Well, very soon you will be able to run an App on your phone , hold it up to a group of people in a room and facial recognition software will be able to recognize their face (cross checked against images that they have on-line) and augmented around the face on the phone screen will be links to the persons likely on-line presence. This will probably include things like Facebook profile, Slideshare account, Flickr page, newspaper reports, LinkedIN profile etc…
The data displayed might also include links to their home address and / or phone number. The App will be able to make educated guesses about some of these things because it will know where it is (eg: its geo-sensitive). For example, just because there are tens of ‘Ollie Bray’s’ living in the UK there is only one (to my knowledge) living in the Edinburgh / Lothian region of Scotland.
Now here is the really interesting thing, this fictitious App that I am describing relies on their being a picture of you on the Internet and then linking data to other on-line sources. When I describe this to people the first reaction I often get is, ‘thank goodness there are no pictures of me on-line’. Of course, these reactions are normally from people who don’t actually have a clue if they have pictures of themselves on-line or not. What they mean is that they haven’t put any pictures of themselves on-line but that doesn’t mean that other people haven’t. You see privacy doesn’t really exist anymore (I’ll come back to this in a separate post).
Of course all of this is fictitious at the moment, but all of the peaces are in place so it won’t be long (I think 12 – 24 months maybe less?). In fact MIT already have a working prototype.
So what does this mean for schools and education? A few things I think.
First of all, more than ever, we need to make sure that we educate our children and young people about what they put on-line. This has to include very young children (I’m talking from 3-11 year olds) and most importantly the teachers that care for them. For far to long we have concentrated our efforts surrounding the Internet safety and responsible use agenda on children that are already too old to really have any worthwhile impact. In short, rightly or wrongly we have been far to reactive and now with the technologies like I have described above just around the corner we need to be far more pro-active to ensure our children remain safe and secure.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think we can stop the above. In fact I think there will be a whole generation of Young People who tick the box (or just ignore the box) on their social networking profile and volunteer their data to be given away in the in the way I have described above.
What ever we do we need to make sure that we raise awareness for both children and education professionals.
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