Safety, Citizenship, and Facebook

A friend on Facebook has friended some former students, so I was privy to a severely disappointing batch of comments on a video put up by one of those former students. The video was fine, in fact it was the fifth grade graduation video of the class that is now going into tenth grade.

The comments, however, fell into one of several categories:
1) sweet and nostalgic
2) gratuitously profane and absurdly vulgar
3) rude, arrogant, and hateful
4) some combination of the above with appalling spelling and grammar errors.

Now, I don't think of myself as naive, and I am no stranger to the pottymouth, but I was really shocked by some of the things these kids were saying to each other. It made me think about my "internet safety and citizenship" curriculum.

I used to formally teach internet safety and citizenship in fourth and fifth grade, in addition to including informal lessons in the earlier grades. The safety part was actually pretty fun and engaging--I made a mask that had Miley Cyrus on one side and a scary picture of Harvey Keitel on the other and did a schtick to demonstrate that you may not know whom you're actually chatting with online; I showed PSAs; I had kids review a selection of internet safety sites for information and tips; and I had them make comics and posters to teach other kids about internet safety. But since the reports came out from the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the Internet Safety Technical Task Force indicating that the threat was much less than we thought, I reduced the emphasis on safety.

I still teach kids to keep certain information (including passwords) private and to be careful talking to strangers online or off, and I make sure they understand that anyone can put anything on the internet, and that it's their responsibility to stay on task and to close the window and let me know if they see anything that seems inappropriate, but I dropped the rest of that part of the curriculum. (This also ties into the part of the curriculum where they learn that you can't believe everything you read on the internet. (or elsewhere!))

The other part of the curriculum, the citizenship part, has basically been "be the same nice person you are in real life." (With some closing thoughts on leaving the internet a better place than you found it) And I leave it at that as if to say "of course you guys would never say anything mean or rude online, or log in to someone else's account, or vandalize a website. We don't even need to discuss it, right?" And this has seemed to be working, as we've had very few problems even though fourth and fifth graders have email and Blogger accounts. (Though, perhaps significantly, the kids now going into tenth grade did not.)

But then this Facebook experience. Should I have spent more time teaching them good internet citizenship? Or would that have been long forgotten by now, and their middle and high-schools should be teaching it? Or their parents? Or are these kids simply not nice in real life either? Or is it a passing phase, just part of the tempest that is adolescence? I'm inclined to believe all of the above. At least some of them have been smart enough not to use their full or real names, so they won't get caught when they're Googled by college admissions departments.

Fourth Grade Bloggers Hitting Their Stride

I am so proud of my fourth grade bloggers! We're in week 4, and though the spelling and conventions may not be perfect, most of them are posting and commenting regularly and thoughtfully now, and some are including links and copyleft images, too! Check them out!

Blogger vs Edublogs

Daunted by the looming task of setting up my fourth graders' blogs, I started considering Edublogs instead of Blogger, based on the great community that Edublogs seems to have, the ability I would have to monitor kids' posts before they go up, and posts like this.
After several hours trying it out, however, I found that my setup will be easier with Blogger. (Plus, we've already laid the difficult groundwork of email and Google accounts.)

Edublogs seems best if you want each student to have their own blog, or all of your students to contribute to one blog, but not so much when you're planning about 20 team blogs with 5-7 students each. Same problem with eChalk, which hosts our school website and has recently added blog capability, but only for individuals, and with the additional problem of having their usernames, which includes their last names, in the address.

Why team blogs?
1) No one wants to go through 130 fourth graders' blogs. It may give them more control and ownership to have their own individual blogs, but they'll have a much smaller audience. This brings it down to about 20 blogs, and they're arranged by topic, which is more authentic.
2) Having team blogs about a specific (but broad) topic gives students something to write about, which should help eliminate the writer's block problem, as well as the pointless posts problem.
3) Teams provide a structure for students to help and support each other.

Kids and Passwords II

Part of the confusion some kids had setting up their accounts could be due to the design of my password sheet, which had 4 boxes: username, email address, ps116.org password, and GoogleDocs password. The boxes on the sheet were similar visually to the ones where they type their passwords online, but the sequence of boxes on the sheet didn't correspond to the sequence of boxes on the login screens. The sequence in my redesign, while not as logical, does correspond to the login screens (with a section for the username and password they enter at ps116.org, and a section for the email address and password they enter at GoogleDocs), and should lessen confusion somewhat.

The only problem is that this year's kids are all set up, so I may have to wait until next September to try it.

The next quandary is whether to let kids choose their own passwords (which many often forget without the password sheet) or have them use a formula (which is less secure, but also teaches them a strategy they can use for managing multiple passwords later in life, and which some still forget). I've tried both and neither is perfect. Anyone else have experience with this?

GoogleDocs in fourth grade

Despite great frustration on the part of about 1/3 of my students who forgot the .org at the end of their emails, or typed ps.116 instead of ps116, or put .com instead of .org, or mistyped their name or password, or any one of the many things that can go wrong when setting up or using an account where email and password are required, my fourth graders are getting acclimated to GoogleDocs.

They will be making presentations in GoogleDocs as proposals for possible topics for their blogs. They won't be presenting the presentations, but I find the format makes it easier for them to organize their thoughts than with a plain blank page.

I scaffolded the heck out of the account set-up: had them write down their username, their email address, and their password before setting up the account, so all they had to do was type what was on the paper; warned them that they had to type carefully and remember the .org and no spaces, etc., but still a full third of them didn't get it in the first class period. Not to mention the kids who had trouble with the captcha or the email verification. (I explain to them that there are mean people in the world who send out robots over the internet to clog up websites and break them, so they have to prove that they are not one of those robots by reading curvy letters and checking email, which robots can't do.)

Anyone have suggestions for easing this process with a group of 32 fourth graders?
(I wonder if GoogleApps for my domain would solve the problem by allowing me to set up the accounts for them, but I was daunted by implementation complications.)

My example blog topic proposal for my students:

Annual movies

The first graders have finished their "about me" movies in iMovie, and the second graders are about to start. Students will make a movie every year about who they are at that point in time, since they change so much so fast. When they graduate, they'll take all the movies with them on dvd as a sort of time capsule of their elementary school years.

In first grade, the movies are interviews with partners, in second, they write and read scripts, and in third-fifth they'll add new elements--editing, titles, transitions, music, still photos. This is a very new project, and I'm open to suggestions!

Choose-your-own-adventure sites

The fourth graders are so close to finishing their choose-your-own-adventure websites! They mapped out the stories, typed and formatted the pages in Dreamweaver, linked and tested them, illustrated in Kidpix, and their work will soon be up on our school site. Meanwhile, check out last year's sites.