ILP- Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship Webinar

I attended a webinar on October 7, 2015 regarding internet safety. The first presenter was Diana Graber who spoke about Cyberwise. Cyberwise provides resources and information to students, teachers, and parents regarding ways to stay safe in the internet and how to create safe profiles.

• don't share too much personal information, be discreet
• cyber civics needs to be supported at home because
• parents are often clueless about what their kids are doing online

The next presenter was Kathy Boehle who introduced the program known as Gaggle which provides student safety solutions for school districts that use Google Apps for Education or Office 365.

When Gaggle sees inappropriate (sexual) images they send it to the National Institute for Missing and Exploited Children, not the school. Gaggle Also gives warnings to students who use inappropriate language. Students have started chatting through Google Docs on school district-owned technology and gaggle has monitored students using these programs to:

• bully
• set up drug deals
• discuss drug use
• speak of self-harm
• sext
• get wrapped up in sex trafficking
• express violence

The final presenter was Luann Hughes who is the director of technology at Temple Independent School District in Texas. She explained how her school district uses tools like Gaggle and other monitoring services to track the online behavior of students. This district has applied monitoring systems on all compatible district devices. They use Gaggle to screen Google Drive to help limit file sharing of assignments. They use Go Guardian to monitor the Chromebooks their high school students have possession of. Gaggle noticed a 5th grader threatening to cut herself so her guardian was called and it turned out to be a false alarm but they were able to educate the young girl on the severity of the situation.

I really enjoyed this webinar. I thought it was well executed and I liked that there were a variety of speakers that gave some insight into what trouble students are likely to get into online and how we as educators can help prevent that. By providing real-life situations that have been monitored, it kept me engaged with what was being spoke about, rather than just being thrown a bunch of statistics.