Week 3

The focus of this week’s lecture was protecting students online. Some of the risks to students identified were exposure to unsuitable material, commercial and financial risks, cyber bullying and harassment, privacy student’s identity, spam and viruses. I was concerned about these risks when I was on placement. As identified during the lecture it is important students learn how to navigate safely through content on the internet and are taught what behaving responsibly and safely means.

I found the recommendations on Cyber Safety on the DEECD website quite helpful. Internet Acceptable Use Agreements (AUAs) and Codes of Practice are something I will be sure to investigate when I am teaching at a school next year as I want to make sure that I have a clear understanding of my responsibilities. It is very important to educate students on cyber safety, as well as managing the learning environment so they support safe use of technology. One of the things I did on placement was to have students go to websites I had checked.

Cyber Pigs is a fantastic way to educate children on commercialism on the internet and how to use the internet safely. I went through the Privacy Playground – Cyber Pigs program and think it would be an engaging way to improve students’ knowledge of how to use the internet safely.
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/games/cybersense_nonsense/


Quia

Creating educational games using Quia http://www.quia.com/web was great fun and very educational. The quiz I made is on energy (http://www.quia.com/hm/668197.htm). It was helpful to swap and look at others and get ideas from them on what they liked and did not like about mine and vice versa. If every child subscribes for the free 30 day trial and students can create quizzes and take turns at each other’s quizzes which I think they would enjoy and benefit from as much as we did. Or students can complete quizzes and activities created by the teacher using Quia. One of the things I really liked about this program was the fact that if students were using this site many of the above mentioned risks were minimized – Quia is child friendly.



















Creating a Design Brief

Creating a Design Brief and investigating how to make a frog jump from limited materials was great fun and we were successful (as can be seen from the video below). This was such an engaging activity and materials needed were so minimal. The activity I feel would certainly help students develop their skills within the VELS Design, Creativity and Technology domain. The design brief helped us to determine the requirements for making a successful frog. The Investigating and designing dimension was easily fulfilled during the activity through the use of a design brief – which we used as a starting point to develop our jumping frog and we then selected and recorded methods for the different possibilities we thought of. Then as required in the Producing dimension we used the appropriate tools and materials to produce a product (a frog that jumped). It was very interesting listening to other peoples designs. Then as per the Analyzing and evaluating dimension we evaluated our choice of design against others. It was great to do a task that was technology but without a specific ICT focus. Doing the activity also made clear the importance of communication and collaboration in designing technology and is a great way for students to practice their communication skills.