Online Security for our Students

I often worry about my own online security and the digital footprint that I have made on the internet. Am I vulnerable based on the information that I have shared and how do I put out a positive image of myself on the internet? Because I am aware of the potential dangers of the internet, I worry about these things, and it also is my responsibility to help my students become aware of internet security issues and help them to become responsible and safe users of the internet.

In Anne Collier's entitled A Better Safety Net: It's Time to Get Smart About Online Safety she discusses what risks youth are most susceptible to due to how they utilize and view the internet as a tool. She discusses how in the past the biggest fear of youth using the internet is predation, and while this remains a concern it has been found that youth involved in internet predation are typically due to common teenage vulnerabilities. The possibility of youth being affected negatively by their peers especially due to cyberbullying and other agressive behavior. In the past with predation being the largest feared internet security issue the largest fear was related to physical security only. However, Collier suggests that physical, psychological, reputational and legal, and identity, property, and identity issues are all important to insure both our own and our youth's internet security. It is our responsibility, especially as teachers, to be able to integrate media literacy and digital citizenship into our classrooms. Overall, I totally agree with Collier in her analysis of online safety and hope to include these teachable practices into my own classroom. This ties well with the talk by Mark Dohn at the MACUL conference in an interesting way. He said that we should let students fail by making mistakes in the classroom with the internet. He thinks that by include security features on the technology that students use at school, that we are indirectly telling them that we do not trust them, and that we are also removing their opportunity for failure. Students should be provided the opportunity to fail with internet security, according to Mark. While I do think that failure is an important part of learning, the idea of completely removing internet security on school computers makes me incredibly nervous. What do you think? I think it would allow for more teachable moments since students don't have this added security on their personal devices....but it's still scary.

Lisa Nielsen writes in her blog about how to "Help students manage their digital footprint and effectively participate in social media." She lists three key pieces to help students:

1) Have a conversation with teens about taking control of their digital footprint.
2) Help teens determine what their digital footprint says about them.
3) Connect with others with your passions and interests

The first step involves having a conversation that makes students think about and take responsibility for their internet footprint. The next step helps students realize how what they put on the internet portrays their identity and how people see them. To better develop, discover, and uncover students' passions and interests, and therefore improve how students portray themselves online. 

Overall while these tips may be helpful to me as a teacher in informing my students about internet security and how to construct and manage their digital footprints, I am going to take some of these lessons to heart for myself. I have grown up with the development of this great tool of the internet but was never taught how to manage my own footprint. Hopefully. I'll be able to both proficiently manage my own digital footprint while also instructing my students on the importance of these practices.

Reflections from MACUL

Yesterday our I traveled to downtown Detroit for the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference with the rest of the members of the Secondary MAC program. We spent the entire day at the COBO center attending talks and I most definitely feel amped up to incorporate some new things into my own classroom.





The first talk that I attended was by Mark Dohn (@mdohn) entitled "Failure is an Option." The primary message of his talk was that in order to learn we must fail and our current education system does not provide the opportunity for failure.

"Failure is a step, not the destination. Failure comes first." 
                Charlie Wollborg, Failurelab Detroit

We must provide opportunities for our students to take risks and stress that with reflection we learn from our mistakes. Not only should we provide these opportunities to our students we should also model failure for our students. For example, when a project involving technology does not go as planned and is falling apart, we as teachers should not quit and give up we should persist, potentially fail, and discuss and reflect upon the failure with our students. I found this talk to be particular interesting, as in my current placement, we do not provide students with many opportunities to take risks and when students do fail we do not embrace and grow from those failures in the ways that Mark suggested. I think that as a new teacher it may be challenging, but it's a great time to start having this mentality with my students as I am sure that in my own practices there will be plenty of failures to grow from in the years to come.

The second session that I attended was by Gary Abud (@MR_ABUD), who is the 2014 Michigan Teacher of the Year, and was titled "Evaluating Teaching with Google Apps: A Case Study." To be quite honest before this session I did not know about teacher evaluations in general, but I feel that I not only learned about how these evaluations are typically done but ways in which Google Apps can be used to improve and streamline the entire process. At the beginning of his talk he had all of the teachers in the room move to a corner of the room that described how their school's used evaluations. Most teachers went to a corner where the evaluations were used to measure students progress and not to help teachers with professional development, while some did think that their schools used evaluations both as a measure and as a tool to provide feedback to teachers. During this activity, one of the teachers gave us some advice that we should talk to our mentors about the evaluation process and see what kind of feedback they receive (if our mentors will share the info). In addition she suggested that we also interview our current principals about evaluation and the process of becoming a new teacher in the school. I plan on taking her advice as I think it will add significantly to my perspective as a new teacher. I feel incredibly oblivious to much of the evaluation process and business of being a teacher and I think that gaining some perspective will allow me to manage actually being a teacher much more professionally. Gary's talk then continued on how his school district has streamlined and adapted how they evaluate teachers using Google Apps and how this has improved the entire evaluation process. One final take away that I think will also help me as a new teacher is to have the perspective that it is a teaching evaluation not a teacher evaluation and that I should not take feedback personally but that I should take the opportunity to improve my own teaching practices.

We concluded our day by listening to lightening talks. These talks varied in topic from allowing students the opportunity to explore to being conscientious of students' backgrounds and providing support and high expectations for them. Overall, these lightening talks served as the final cherry on top of a very motivating and exciting day. I left MACUL feeling amped up and ready to start planning how I can provide my students with more responsibility, opportunities to explore their world, and provide opportunities for failure.

Planning for Technology Teach-In

Currently in my classroom we are beginning a unit on chemical bonding, and soon will be moving into intermolecular forces. Each of these topics are fairly abstract topics for students to grasp strongly, and in my own experiences in the high school chemistry classroom, typically learned through rote memorization. However, in my placement classroom we attempt to make abstract concepts easier for students to visualize by incorporating online simulations. 

For this particular lesson I am planning on having students use a PhET simulation called "States of Matter." 

Students have had experience working with this same simulation when learning about how molecules move upon being heated/cooled and therefore what it looks like at the molecular level when a substance is a solid, liquid, or gas. The general goal of this particular lesson is to bring together students' knowledge of molecules and intermolecular forces. In prior lessons they discovered what certain intermolecular forces are, such as, dipole-dipole interaction and london dispersion forces, and now they will use this simulation to gain a physical perspective of the strengths of these various forces.

Prior to starting this lesson, students will complete a warm-up activity reviewing the various types of intermolecular forces, then they will be introduced to the daily objective, and given a brief overview of how to use the simulation. Then the class will travel to the computer lab and begin the simulation activity.

Students will use a provided handout to guide them through the use and concepts involved in the simulation. Students will first complete the simulation with Neon, a nonpolar substance, and then compare the the same properties (such as boiling point) for oxygen and water. Each of these substances are included in this particular simulation.

Students will compare the mountain-valley-hill diagram, more formally known as a potential energy diagram, for these three substances, in addition to determining important phase change values, such as the melting and boiling points. By comparing these properties, students will be able to determine the strength of various intermolecular forces using their understanding of the compounds as nonpolar or polar.

 Students will find that it takes the most energy (heat) to overcome hydrogen bonding (polar molecules), followed by dipole-dipole interactions, and then london dispersion forces. After completing this simulation the class will discuss and explain their results in a debrief session.

Using this particular online tool through PhET will allow students to gain a molecular understanding of the strength of various intermolecular forces, an abstract and microscopic topic that is generally hard to visualize. This simulation will serve as a basis for future understandings centered on this important chemistry topic.

Please let me know if you can think of any improvements to the simulation activity. My students are used to working in the computer lab on similar types of activities, but I am interested in exploring different ways to debrief the content. Typically we have a teacher-centered discussion in which the teacher asks questions and uses sticks with student names to elicit student responses. I am interested in increasing the responsibility of my students and think that some kind of group presentations to the class in which each group explains their results (perhaps dividing by different substances tested). However, we have never completed this type of activity in my mentor teacher's classroom and I would appreciate any advice, ideas, or suggestions. Thank you for you help in advance!