How to teach Net safety, ethics, security? Blend them in!

US K-12 students aren't getting adequate instruction in "cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity," according to a just-released study sponsored by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and Microsoft released today. The survey, of more than 1,000 teachers, 400 administrators, and 200 tech coordinators, found that – although over 90% of administrators, teachers, and tech coordinators support teaching these topics in school – only 35% of teachers and just over half of school administrators say the topics are required in their curriculum. A bit of pass-the-buck thinking turned up in the results too – 72% of teachers said parents bear most of the responsibility for teaching these topics (51% of administrators say teachers do). They're both partly right; it's everybody's responsibility, the experts say (see this). But the thing is, most teachers are already teaching online safety (which includes ethics) and may not even know it. More on that in a moment....

The filtering hurdle

The biggest hurdle to Net-safety instruction may actually be school filters! Note this statement in the study's press release: "The survey also found a high reliance on shielding students instead of teaching behaviors for safe and secure Internet use. More than 90% of schools have built up digital defenses, such as filtering and blocking social network sites...." Then note UK education watchdog Ofsted's finding just last month – that schools using extensive or "locked down" filtering "were less effective in helping [students] to learn how to use new technologies safely." If schools could just teach a lot of what they've always taught, folding digital media in with traditional media (aka books, pencils, etc.), the academic ethics and citizenship they've always "taught" (hopefully modeled and encouraged) will naturally include "cyberethics," for example.

Citizenship is a verb!

A classroom is a community, as is a blog, a team, or the group of people working together on a Google Doc. How do participants/"citizens" treat one another in those various communities as well as in the classroom one? You can't *be* a citizen without a chance to practice citizenship in the community where you're supposed to be a citizen. The same goes for the digital sort; today's social media give us a whole array of opportunities to practice citizenship in online communities.

"Student leadership becomes an engine of citizenship," Sylvia Martinez of GenYes told me in a phone interview recently. I asked her what she meant by student leadership: "It's putting students in charge of something that matters [such as enlisting students to help integrate technology and digital media into the classroom, as GenYes programs do for schools] – giving them responsibility, then watching them, expecting them to do things that show they've accepted the responsibility, and then challenging them to do more," Martinez adds. "It's a cycle. Students are engaged [citizenship as civic engagement – or, in this case, classroom, task, or project engagement] because they're doing something important." So let students help with or run the incorporating of blogs, wikis, Google docs, and nings into class work!

Citizenship is protective

As for "cybersafety," that too is practiced naturally when people are thinking about citizenship (and ethics!) online and offline. How can I say that? Because the research shows that peer harassment and cyberbullying represent the most common risk to students, and aggressive behavior more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized; so civility, respect for others, and citizenship represent the lion's share of safety online for students. [As for the predation risk, which is extremely low for students who are not already deemed "at risk youth," the research shows (see this), the don't-talk-to-strangers-online message and associated fears have gotten through to kids during several years of technopanic; a teacher in New Jersey recently told me that her middle school students are just as afraid of predators as their parents are.]

Media literacy – critical thinking about behavior as well as information in a blog, wiki, Ning, or virtual world – supports citizenship and safety, as students learn to think critically about the motives behind and accuracy of info, comments, photos, text messages, etc. they download and upload, whether the source is a friend, advertiser, or stranger. This is not rocket science!

Students involved in tech integration can also model and help teach good computer and network security practices – that third C in the study mentioned above, Cybersecurity. This, too, is an aspect of good citizenship: protecting our passwords, not being tricked by phishers and other manipulators, and knowing what's needed to protect our computers and networks. Critical thinking is key here, too, because social engineering, or manipulation, is a basic component of phishing and malicious hacking.

Basic ingredients, with or without a recipe

This kind of "online safety" education – learning to behave civilly and ethically online and offline and to respect one's own and others' passwords, identities, and intellectual and physical property at home and school – is not only protective, it's *relevant* to students because they enable all of us to function effectively in a 21st-century media environment.

Martinez told me that half the schools GenYes works with say they don't want a cybercurriculum, and about half very definitely do. So, hey, if any schools do want formal curricula or lesson plans for "cybersafety, cybersecurity, and cybercitizenship," there is no better material than Cybersmart's. Just don't let those big words make you think that this is all about new technology, some sort of add-on to students' life or education, or anything that we haven't all been thinking about and working on together for a very long time!

Related link

You only need one: educator Anne Bubnic's 2.5 pages of "digital citizenship" links, starting here.

*Collaborative* reputation protection

"The 'Protecting Reputations Online' video should be mandatory viewing for students," wrote/tweeted Bernajean Porter, an educator I admire, in Twitter this week. So I watched it (it's just under 3 minutes) – and was reminded of how collaborative reputation protection is these days. Because "digital" means social, young people are not acting all by themselves in a vacuum – they're sharing text, photos, and videos and, through them, talking about themselves and each other. That's the most important point in the video, I think: that there's a mutual dependency on and responsibility for each other's good name and reputation in social media. We truly are in this together – not just peers, but parents, educators, all of us. Nobody's operating in a vacuum in today's media. Tell your kids: "Your friends affect your reputation – you need their help in maintaining it and vice versa." Here are reputation-management tips and just-released research from Microsoft, and youth-specific resources from the American School Counselor Association and iKeepSafe.org.

Turning young players into game designers

Microsoft Research is literally creating code kids can play with. It's called Kodu – a play on the word "code" – and it's a programming language for creating games on Xbox that's "designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone," Microsoft says on its Web page about it. You design with a game controller (and my 12-year-old thought he was going to have to learn game design in college!). But you're actually designing a game while playing a game – how cool is that? Chris Wilson at Slate tried it and writes that it's "also actually fun!" [See also "From 'chalk 'n' talk' to learning by doing" for a story about a school in New York, Quest to Learn, that teaches with videogames – subjects from math and history to videogame design – and for links to great resources on learning in play.]

25 billion+ videos viewed

That was just this past August in the US, according to comScore's latest figures - yet another online video-viewing record. More than 10 billion of those views were on Google sites, with YouTube representing 99% of Google video traffic. In terms of people, "161 million US Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded," comScore Video Metrix reports. The rest of August's Top 5 video-sharing locations were Microsoft Sites, Viacom Digital, Hulu, and Fox Interactive (MySpace). Now, for a little context, check out Clive Thompson in Wired on "How YouTube Changes the Way We Think" (and converse).

*Good* news involving swine flu

There just may be an upside to the swine flu: It may be the cause of more educators becoming comfortable with using interactive technology (aka social media) in the classroom. With the message that its wiki-like online collaboration tool, Office Live Workspace, can help keep classes on track if schools close for flu outbreaks, Microsoft "has launched a how-to Web site that walks teachers through the steps of setting up accounts for their classes on ... the free Web service," the Associated Press reports. Pretty much like Wikispaces.com, Google Sites, and Wetpaint's Wikis in Education, the service can be used by teachers to post assignments and handouts so that students can work on the assignments individually or collaboratively from home. According to eSchoolNews, Microsoft and other companies, such as Pearson Education, are responding to a call by Education Secretary Arne Duncan "to help keep home-bound students sick with the H1N1 flu virus connected to school."

Bing's better

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, got off to a rocky start where porn filtering was concerned. It got rave reviews except for the way it allowed people to bypass its SafeSearch filter even after set to "strict filtering," which my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid wrote about at CNET. Microsoft quickly made two changes that pretty much solve the problem if parents have filtering software installed on the computers their kids use (or use Microsoft's or Apple's operating-system-level parental controls). Now you can just put the URL "explicit.bing.net" into the filter's list of sites to block, and the filter will block all sexually explicit images Bing searches might turn up. Sites already excluded from the filter, such as Playboy.com, will also not display in Bing.com, Larry explains. What won't work is what I suggested in my original post about Bing: simply turning on strict filtering and - if kids are compliant with a rule about not changing the strict setting - having peace of mind that nothing untoward will turn up without filtering software, as is true with other search engines. But to Microsoft's credit, it acted very quickly in response to concerns.

Microsoft: Forget the controller

Is it a trend, or is Microsoft just trying to leapfrog Nintendo as it goes for more family videogame players? Maybe both. First, with the Wii, Nintendo turned the videogame controller into "a simple swing-and-swivel device. Now Microsoft wants to ditch the controller entirely and leave the swinging and swiveling to you," USATODAY reports. With the help of none other than Steven Spielberg, Microsoft made the point at the recent E3 gaming conference that controllers are intimidating to people and - despite the huge videogame market - 60% of households don’t own videogame consoles. So it unveiled the console-less "Project Natal" with demos of "a painting game that lets players fling paint onto the screen like Jackson Pollock" and a "dodgeball-type game [that] had a player moving forward and back, left and right, using arms, legs and the whole body to ricochet balls and knock down walls of 3-D tiles," USATODAY adds - but with no details on pricing or release date, the Christian Science Monitor adds. But Nintendo keeps innovating too, also with sensors. At E3, it showed off a "Vitality Sensor," which takes videogame players' pulses, Forbes reports. It's "another milestone in Nintendo's quest to break down traditional definitions of videogames," Forbes says, but adding that Nintendo didn't announce what role the sensor would have in future games.

But back to the controller. Microsoft probably hopes that the 60% of households who don't own consoles won't just play games on cellphones. The New York Times recently reported that the iPhone is becoming a significant gaming platform, with games representing three-quarters of "the most popular paid downloads" from the iPhone App Store (Apple also recently announced that 1 billion apps had been downloaded from the store in its first nine months). But beyond games, iPhone's just about all things to all people - it can be anything from a baby rattle (USATODAY reports) to a musical instrument (hear it on the YouTube video).

Bing: Microsoft's new search engine

It's not just a search engine, it's "a decision engine," Microsoft says. So it's not trying to replace Google, just offer a different kind of service, one requiring fewer clicks, in some cases. "For example, if you type in the name of a city you get local weather, hotel prices and other information without having to click anywhere," reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in the San Jose Mercury News. "Bing is not only visually more attractive, it's also more informative," he adds. In "Bing it on," USATODAY reports that "you can also search for images and video, with a 'smart video preview' that lets you peek at 30-second clips (hula dancing, Don Ho) by scrolling over the video. You can play the video from the Bing results page, no matter where on the Web it is coming from."

To try it, just go to Bing.com. For filtered search, click on "Extras" in the extreme upper-right-hand corner, then on "Preferences." "SafeSearch" is at the top of that page. "Moderate" filtering seems to be the default. After you've chosen "Strict," "Moderate," or "Off," be sure to click on "Safe Settings" over on the right (and if this is on your child's computer, you'll probably need an accompanying rule that no one changes the setting without permission). You may want to extend the setting and rule to all search engines and household computers, but if kids (or their friends) aren't compliant, you may need a backup plan (which sometimes means turning on filtering at the operating-system level or installing filtering software).

THIS JUST IN!: After I wrote the above about SafeSearch, Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely co-director tested it with Bing's video search, and parents probably won't be pleased by what he found: In video search, but with SafeSearch filtering set to "Strict," he typed a word sure to turn up porn in the search box. "I was first warned that it 'may return explicit adult content' and told that 'to view these videos, turn off SafeSearch.' One click later, SafeSearch was off, and I was looking a page of naughty thumbnails. And, as advertised, hovering the mouse over a thumbnail started the video and audio. Even when playing in a small thumbnail, it was unmistakably hard core porn," Larry writes in CNET.

Canadian study: Cyberbullying seen as 'cool'

A recent survey found that 40% of Canadian 9-to-17-year-olds say they've been cyberbullied (43% female, 38% male), nearly 60% said there were no consequences, and "some 60% of the respondents agree people bully because it’s 'cool'," reports the Vancouver Sun, citing the survey from Microsoft Canada and market research firm Youthography. The London (Ont.) Free Press reports that Canadian "parents are more involved than ever with their children's online activities," with 84% of respondents saying they've talked with their parents about Internet dangers. Here's the study's press release. In other findings:

9-to-12-year-old Canadians are online just under two hours a day, on average, compared to three hours a day for teens 13-to-17-year-olds

Girls primarily go online to socialize, with "68% saying that is what they value the Internet for" and the same percentage of boys saying they value the ability to play games.

"Teens are more likely than tweens to use the Internet to escape problems, deal with stress and avoid family problems.

30% have lied about their age on a social networking site, and 15% have pretended to be someone they are not.

15% have had their passwords stolen.

76% are very careful about the personal information they divulge online.