This is where the week 1 discussion will take place. Please respond to the questions by adding a comment below. The questions have been highlighted for your convenience.
Keeping young learners safe online is a big responsibility for teachers. While we're teaching language, we also want to model good digital citizenship and safety habits. We also want to shield our students from inappropriate online behavior.
Step 1: Become familiar with online safety
- Watch one (or both of these short videos): Brain Pop Jr. Internet Safety or Common Sense with Phineas and Ferb. Feel free to browse both pages for quizzes and additional information about cyber safety.
- Answer these questions in the comments below:
- How can we keep our students safe online?
- What do you do to keep your students safe? (If you already work with students online)
- What will you do in the future? (If you aren't currently working online with young learners)
Additional optional readings:
Generation Safe
This website includes a LOT of information, and an entire curriculum for teaching cyber safety and digital literacy. If you have time, check out the videos in the Google Literacy Tour. Even though we won't be doing anything with this site during our session, it's such a comprehensive resource we wanted to include it in our links.
Internet Safety for Kids
This short blog post by Jennifer Verschoor includes some great games to help children learn about online safety.
This is a great video which has a story that we found very powerful
Step 2: Learn about Creative Commons licenses
Digital Storytelling often involves images, and part of digital citizenship is responsible use of online images. We want students to learn to respect copyright, and to identify where they found images. Creative Common licensing has become a simple way for people to define how their images (and other works) can be used.
- Watch this slide show explaining Creative Commons. Generally, permission to use images ranges from pictures that are in the public domain (anyone can use them) to images that are copyright and require permission to use. Creative Commons licenses grant permission in advance. All Creative Commons licenses require attribution (meaning you have to credit the person who shared the image).
- Explore various licenses by doing an online image search. Go to the Flickr Advanced Search page. (Flickr.com --> click on search --> click on advanced search --> enter a keyword, like "animals", scroll down and tick the box that says "search only in Creative Commons-licensed content"). Click on an image and then on the image page click on the license. What are the restrictions? How can you use the image?
- Explore resources for images that are either public domain or Creative Common license:
- Wikimedia Commons (4 million images in the public domain)
- Free Images (6000 stock photos, and they require you to credit them as the source)
- World Images (80,000 photos from the California State University IMAGE project, under a non-commercial CC license)
- ELT Pics (Images taken by teachers for teachers, collected via Twitter and stored on Flickr, under a non-commercial CC license)
- PhotoPin (a search engine that finds Creative Commons images)
- Wylio- Search engine for CC images for bloggers
- PhotoeXpress- lengthy registration process but you get 10 free quality stock images a day with a search engine and you don't have to attribute.
- CCMixter.org- Great songs, music that is Creative Commons! Just give attribution
- FreeSound- Free sound files and clips for use!
- Soundzabound- Claims to be the ONLY royalty free music library which meets all the licensing and technology requirements needed for education!
Find many more resources in our LiveBinder! Just click the tabs and browse! We update this each week!
- Do you have a favorite site for images or did you discover a great site while browsing? Please share the link in our Edmodo group so we can add it to our resources? How about music? We aren't going to be focusing on it, but online music clips face the same copyright issues as images do. Have you found good sites with Creative Commons-licensed music? Please share!