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online safety

Cybersecurity for Everyone– From Students to Senior Citizens

by Peggy Reimers October 26, 2022

written by Peggy Reimers

There are great cybersecurity tips for adults, but what about kids? Scammers and online criminals are actively targeting kids to obtain not only their personal information but also to gain their parents’ or guardians’ information. And as we know, our youth are growing up in a world where they are connected to the internet 24/7, which means we need to give them the tools and knowledge to be safe and secure online.

Did you know once scammers obtain a child’s personal information, they can:

Open up new lines of credit?
Try to obtain a family member’s credit card or bank account to make fraudulent purchases?
Sell their information on the dark web?

Five Security Tips for Students

So what do we need to share with our students so they can be informed, protect their personal data online, and not fall victim to identity theft? Here are five tips to get you started at home or school. Both teachers and parents should be having discussions with our youth to make sure they have the information and resources they need to protect their personal data.

Create screen names and email addresses that do not include your first and last name.
Create passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols.
Don’t respond to emails from strangers.
Do not share your password with anyone except a parent/guardian.
Do not leave your computer or mobile device unattended.

Infographic highlighting 5 cybersecurity tips for students from the article text

Cybersecurity Scenarios

Remember, scammers use a variety of platforms to try and extract information by email, phone calls, social media, and online websites. Another way to open up the lines of communication on the topic of cybersecurity is to share and discuss situations that students could encounter. Teachers and parents, try out these scenarios, so our young people know what scammers are seeking. After each scenario, have a conversation and ask, “What are the red flags, and how should we handle this situation?” The answer to every scenario is to show an adult as soon as possible and never correspond with the message.

Avery has posted a skateboarding video on ThePipe video site and received the following comment: “You are so talented. Click on this link to win a fabulous XYX board. Just enter your last name, address, and phone number to be entered into the drawing.”

A new friend, Braxton, on CracklePopChat DMs you: “Post a video of you getting home from school and then your parents getting home from work. I am gathering information for my Science Fair project, due in two days, and I need to gather data ASAP.”

Your new friend, Celia, on the popular online gaming site, PruneSpace, sends you a link to a new free gaming site, Dario Cart 100: “Just click on the link and enter your current username and password for the popular game you are playing right now, and you will have free access for one year. The offer expires in an hour, so don’t wait!”

Your “Uncle David” on RightAwayGram posts a cute baby picture and asks everyone to post their own birthdate.

You receive a phone call. The caller says: “This is Google Security calling to let you know there have been several attempts to order items on your mother’s credit card. To stop this fraudulent behavior, please verify the school you attend and your mother’s place of work. We will put a stop payment on her account.”

You receive an email from the accounts@soccialsecurityadminstrattion.net. The email states: “We are emailing you to let you know your social security number has been found on the dark web. Please send us your social security number so we can freeze your account until this issue is resolved.”

Cybersecurity Resources for Students

CISA provides the following:

Screenshot of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign website.

Parent and Educator Tip Card
Chatting with Kids about Being Online Booklet
Family Cybersecurity Presentation
Kids Presentation
Spread the Word Guide

Cyber.org has an introductory course for students in grades K-12. The course has two main topics: security and digital citizenship. Educators will need to answer a few questions before access is granted.

Screenshot of cybersecurity basics website from cyber.org.

Cybersecurity for Senior Citizens

Our children are not the only target of cyber criminals. Unfortunately, our senior citizens are often targeted as well. I know this to be true as my neighbor (in her 80s) paid $5000 because she received a phone call. The person on the phone stated that her grandson had been jailed in Mexico. My neighbor is a very spunky and intelligent woman, but criminals know how to pull at your heartstrings to extract cash. They can be very convincing, persuasive, and sometimes threatening and frightening.

AARP shares an online article on seven actual phone call pitches that were reported on the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline. The caller topics include:

Medicare
Phone company
IRS
Arrest of a Family Member
Amazon
Utility Company
Social Security Administration

I highly recommend sharing these scenarios with your older family and friends. The dialogue is spot on as these are actual situations that happen frequently, and they also have advice on what to do. Think of it as cyber stranger danger!

We need to share, share, share to help everyone stay safe and secure online! Have any other ideas or resources to share? Throw them in the comments so we can all add to our cybersecurity toolbelts.

October 26, 2022 1 comment

Three Resources to Boost Kids’ Digital Safety

by Miguel Guhlin October 21, 2022

written by Miguel Guhlin

Wish someone had your back as a parent or educator when it comes to cybersecurity so that when you had questions, you knew where to go to find the answers? Or do you wish that someone suggested the questions and answers because you don’t even know what to ask? If so, you’ve come to the right place. TCEA.org’s TechNotes blog offers a lot of suggestions and resources for cybersecurity. What’s more, we’ve rounded up some information sources you don’t want to miss.

Let’s take a look at three amazing resources– all available for free. These resources can help you deal with tough topics. And they can offer suggestions for safeguarding your digital life.

Resource #1: Firefox for Families

The makers of the Firefox browser, Mozilla, have put together an incredible resource. Designed for parents, it has the following objectives:

To make awkward tech conversations with kids less awkward
To offer starter topics to get things rolling

The topics include a host of easy to read issues you need to know about:

Privacy
Mental Health
Bullying
Public wifi
Passwords
Private Mode

One of the most important components is The Super-Official Family Tech Agreement. This agreement is a PDF that resembles a contract between the child(ren) and the parent(s) or caregiver(s). It addresses various key tenets of digital citizenship without engaging in pedantry. Its four main tenets include:

Be yourself and stay safe.
Talk to me!
Oh, the places you’ll please never go.
The endless suckiness of time sucks.

As you can imagine, Firefox for Families worked hard to keep the content light-hearted. And they covered a wide variety of tough topics, offering parental tips along the way.

Some of the parental tips they offer?

Turn off location services for apps.
Talk with children about how their social apps make them feel.
Agree to report online bullying to school administrators.

The Firefox for Families TechTalk website also offers great factoids, such as:

Sixteen percent of students in grades 9–12 have experienced cyberbullying. (Source: Stopbullying.gov, 2019 US Study)
Data harvesters have captured more than 72 million bits of personal data. This is by the time children turn 13 years of age.

This is a great resource to share with parents of young children, as well as middle and high school students. The topics Firefox for Families addresses in this resource are timely. What’s more, the nurturing conversation the contract offers focuses on building trust.

As a parent, building trust is an approach I recommend more than “big brother” approaches. Of course, it all depends on how your family works.

Resource #2: Google Safety Center

kids' digital life — Google Safety Center, iPhone Screenshots

The Google Safety Center offers a variety of resources and tools centered around:

Security and Privacy
Family Safety
Leadership

Family Link

The Family Safety component offers tips on how to set ground rules with Family Link. This is a way of saying, “Google can help you watch what your children do online.” For parents who want to trust AND verify what children do online, you will want to learn more about Family Link.

Family Link helps you manage your children’s accounts and devices as they explore online. You can manage apps, keep an eye on screen time, and help set digital ground rules for your family.

With the Family Link app, you can set daily limits and bedtimes for apps to “stop working.” You can also get app activity reports that let you see what your children are up to. Family Link is an app that you can install on both iOS and Android devices.

Kids Space

The Google Safety Center highlights other apps that can assist younger children. For example, Kids Space offers content to “help children discover, create, and grow.” It’s available only for Android tablets. Kids Space’s website also offers a parental guide to get you started.

YouTube Kids

Another kid-friendly space Google manages is YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids offers family-friendly videos, as well as parental resources. One of those resources includes tools you can use as a parent to control what your children can see, as well as a timer. You can also block what children have access to.

There are a lot of resources and tools in the Google Safety Center. Be prepared to spend some time exploring and taking action.

Resource #3: Be Internet Awesome

Another digital citizenship-friendly offering from Google, Be Internet Awesome offers a game. The game, “Interland,” teaches digital safety and citizenship to kids. Kids help fellow “Internauts” fight against hackers, phishers, oversharers, and bullies.

Besides the game, the Be Internet Awesome website offers the following:

Family Tips and Activities
Family Guide to Supervised Experiences on YouTube
Google Families curated content (including resources from PBS Kids and Common Sense Media)
A Family Pledge in English and Spanish
Family Link Parent’s Guide
Internaut Papercraft Activity Template
And a lot more.

While most of the links work, some, like the Family Safety Contract, are broken. This suggests the site may need some updating. In the meantime, check out CommonSense Media’s Family Media Agreement (PDF).

More Resources Available

Want access to more amazing resources? You might explore these websites:

And to learn more about safeguarding your kids’ technology use, explore the FTC’s website.

October 21, 2022 0 comment

Cybersecurity Digital Citizenship

Creating Passwords for Elementary Students

by Peggy Reimers October 11, 2022

written by Peggy Reimers

What do the following have in common? Here’s a hint: They have to do with passwords.

Hopefully, red lights and sirens started going off in your head. These made the list of most common passwords in 2022. Yes, you read that right! The next most common included a pet’s name, a significant date (like a birthday or anniversary), and a sports team. Go, Astros! In this day and age, we all have to do better. That said, how do we help our young students create a strong password?

Three Basic Rules for Creating a Good Password

Use a minimum of eight letters (16 characters or more is best!)
Include lowercase and uppercase letters
Include numbers and symbols

Two Methods for Young Students

1. Memorable-Random Method

You are hopefully asking, “What is this?” Ian, Levy, National Cyber Security Centre, UK, Technical Director recommends “combining three random but memorable words. Be creative and use words memorable to you, so people can’t guess your password.”

This is the perfect spot to bring in AutoDraw. Autodraw is a web-based tool that pairs machine learning with drawings created by Selman Design, a design studio in New York. The best thing about Autodraw is it is free! This handy-dandy tool works on your phone, computer, or tablet. I love this little tool, as it turns my unrecognizable drawings into great pictures or icons.

Using Autodraw, have your students sketch three random pictures. They can then write their unique passwords on index cards for the teacher to keep. See my three examples below. Make sure students include at least one capital letter and a number; for your older elementary students, add a symbol!

2. The Sentence Method

This method is also described as the “Bruce Schneier Method.” The idea is to think of a random sentence and transform it into a password using a rule. For example, take the first two letters of every word to create your password. For the younger students, I would suggest having them create a sentence of five to six words and use each word’s first letter. And remember, to make it stronger, add a number that has meaning, like their birth month or a favorite number.

Using the website “How Secure is My Password?” if you check “password,” you’ll see it would be cracked instantly. And the password “MDTfhb!12” would be cracked in three weeks. Now I realize “MDTfhb!12” is not the strongest, but this is a start in helping our students use best practices when creating passwords. *SMAGP2day1# (So, make a good password today)! And yes, it would take two million years to crack this one!

October 11, 2022 0 comment

Cybersecurity Digital Citizenship Social Media Social-Emotional Learning

Where Do We Go from Here?

by Luann Hughes June 15, 2022

written by Luann Hughes

I can’t stop thinking about May 24. Nineteen innocent students and two faultless teachers senselessly lost their lives. One teen, only 18 years old, was so troubled that he shot his own grandmother and murdered 21 people in what should be a place of safety– school.

I have been in public education for 42 years. As all of us who have been around for a while can attest, there are many changes and challenges that public schools have weathered. But this continuing trend of hatred and rage has me worried and heartsick.

We are seeing the profound effect of social media, access to inappropriate information, and easy anonymous communication on those that we in public schools want most to protect– our students. In our physical world, the boundaries and restrictions are easier to maintain. But, in the world of technology, “anything goes.” The easy access to hatred and violence online can cause children to be desensitized and create the potential for aggression. Things that people would never say to each other in a civilized conversation in our society are celebrated on social media. Make no mistake, our students are watching how adults, including our country’s leadership, behave (or misbehave) online.

Managing and Monitoring Online Access: How?

School districts spend thousands of dollars every year trying to keep inappropriate websites off the screens of school computers. Parents face an almost insurmountable challenge in trying to keep their children away from information that should never be exposed to those of such a tender age. Our children have access at their fingertips to things that can be very harmful to them (think sexting, cyberbullying, and pornography.) There are reasons why children SHOULD have restricted access to certain content until they are adults. Children do not have the skill set, maturity, or experience to handle it.

Digital Citizenship Needs Action, Not Just Talk

The time has come for us to recognize this problem and take action. Digital citizenship requires more than mere lip service in our state standards and local curriculum. It must be intentionally taught and supported in the classroom. However, teachers have not been provided with the right tools to help students navigate this brave new world that technology has brought us. Technology leaders and parents must demand that funding be provided and regulations enacted to keep our children safe and smart online, both in and out of school. Additionally, it is imperative that we find better ways to use technology for recognizing students who are crying out for help. We have left our students alone to manage technology that is too much for them for too long.

Five Ways to Take Action

Now we ask, “Where do we go from here?” Here are some steps we can take to

Contact your state legislators.
- Let them know the importance of funding ways for students to ask for help online, or help other students by reporting what they see.
- Stress the importance of teaching digital citizenship and safety as a required part of the curriculum.
Explore some of these free resources to learn more:
Get students involved on your campus to help create a Digital Safety Awareness program.
Partner with your counselors or student services department to have digital safety and awareness sessions for parents. Even better still, engage and encourage parents to help lead these sessions.
Speak up often about how to be safe and healthy online. You know that your students (and your own children and grandchildren) are listening and looking to you for guidance. Learn how your students can get help online and then share with them how to use those resources. Let them know that it is OK to ask for help or tell an adult when they know someone who needs help.

I have talked about this for too long without taking enough action to correct the problems that unsafe online access is creating for our students. I’m ready to take action. Will you join me?

June 15, 2022 0 comment

Educational Trends Good Teaching Uncategorized

Teaching Digital Resilience

by Guest Blogger May 25, 2018

written by Guest Blogger

In today’s world, much of our society happens online. It’s where people socialize, share ideas, and debate. However, it also isn’t without potential dangers. Extremist groups recruit online. Cyberspace has been added to land, air, and sea as the fourth arena of warfare. Just as we teach students how to be safe and healthy and to be good citizens in the real world, we now need to help them develop online life skills.

Keeping Ahead of the Curve

There is so much technology developing so fast that it can seem daunting to keep up. As soon as we’ve figured out one platform students love, they’re on to the next. The revelations about social media sites, privacy, security, and data collection come at such a dizzying pace that it is hard for most adults to put on their own digital oxygen masks, much less help the child next to them.

Fortunately, the technology itself is mostly irrelevant for providing students with the foundation they need to develop digital resilience and be good digital citizens. And it isn’t that different from what we’ve been teaching them all along for succeeding in life.

Developing Digital Resilience

Digital resilience is the technical, emotional, and critical thinking skills students (and educators) need to enjoy the benefits of the internet while still spotting the dangers and managing the risks.

Let’s start by taking a look at the potential risks students may encounter online. They could stumble upon or have risky content shared by others on their social media feeds. This content could include violent or pornographic imagery or pro-suicide or pro-anorexia. They are open to grooming by sexual predators, recruitment by extremist groups, stalking, and bullying. Like adults, they can be subject to identity theft, phishing, and accidentally downloading malicious code.

Keep Things Private

Kids are so adept at snapping, tweeting, posting, commenting, and hashtagging that it may seem they have the technical skills to manage their safety online. But they may not know how, or think to block an online harasser. They may not be checking their privacy or location settings.

A good conversation to have around a popular social platform is “What are the privacy settings? What information am I sharing that I don’t realize I’m sharing? Who is able to see what I’m sharing? Who may be watching me online?”

Keep Communication Open

Kids face the same emotional challenges online that they face on the playground or in the cafeteria. And they tend to have a stronger reaction to online harassment than real life incidents. They also tend to feel more ashamed of and hide online harassment. If you impart just one message to your students about their online lives, encourage them to seek support and help from an adult if they have any online interaction that makes them uncomfortable.

Make Vetting Online Content a Teachable Moment

In this age of doctored photos, fake videos, memes, misinformation, disinformation, and online trolls, each of us needs to sharpen our critical thinking skills on online content. This is really just a fresh source for examples on fact vs. opinion, point of view, and evaluating the source of information. One challenge with using actual content your students have encountered online is it may contain sensitive material. It would be wise to address this with your administration.

Digital Citizenship

The other side of the online coin is digital citizenship. As we teach students about being a good citizen in their real-life communities, it is time to extend those lessons and discussions to include what a good citizen does online.

Be Kind

Just like in real life, good digital citizens don’t bully. They are polite. They think about how their words make the other person feel. People of all ages tend to quickly sink to rude and bullying exchanges online that they wouldn’t in person. Let’s teach our students to think about the person behind that profile picture.

Be a Leader

Good digital citizens are leaders online. They vet information before they share it. They avoid sharing junk information like memes. They lead by example in how they engage with others and refuse to be baited into name-calling.

Be Careful of Your Digital Footprint

Students also need to think about their permanent online record and how the way they engage online now could impact a future job or other opportunities. There is a saying “The internet never forgets.” Even if you delete something, you never know who downloaded it or took a screenshot. With internet archive tools like the Way Back Machine, everything that has ever been posted online is archived and retrievable.

When thinking about how to help your students develop their digital resilience and digital citizenship skills, look to the lessons you are already teaching on emotional resilience, critical thinking, and personal safety. Incorporate examples and discussion of what these things look like online.

More Resources to Teach These Skills

DigCitUtah provides lesson plans on digital citizenship for grades K -12.
CommonSense.org offers a K -12 digital citizenship curriculum.
This is a worldwide concern. Many European countries have excellent teacher resources. These Vodafone digital skills lessons can be easily adapted to an American classroom.
Video – Digital Resilience Toolkit: What is digital resilience?
Video – Digital Resilience Toolkit: Supporting 6 –10 year olds
Video – Digital Resilience Toolkit: Supporting 11- 13 year olds

This is a guest blog by Lydia Snider. Snider served as an educator for nearly 20 years, primarily as a K-5 resource specialist. After leaving teaching, she spent about a decade in the California tech scene and working as a consultant helping companies understand how to use social media for business.

May 25, 2018 0 comment

CTO/CIO Digital Literacy

Teaching Kids (and Adults) about Clickbait

by Lori Gracey May 7, 2017

written by Lori Gracey

I noticed something happening on my Facebook the other day. Suddenly, I was getting a lot of “sponsored stories” (ie. ads) with salacious headlines. Things like “Stop eating chicken breasts immediately!” and “You won’t believe what this famous star has become.” Then I noticed them showing up on my news websites: “Enter your name, wait 12 seconds, and brace yourself.” (Really? Why 12 seconds? Isn’t 10 standard?) And once I started seeing them, suddenly they were everywhere. Welcome to 2017, the year that clickbait becomes the norm.

What Is Clickbait?

According to Wikipedia, clickbait is a term for “web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks.”

There are several parts of that definition that jumped out at me. First, it’s all about the bottom line of selling stuff to unsuspecting internet browsers (like your students). Second, the people who create clickbait are very okay with sacrificing quality and accuracy. And third, they really want us to forward this garbage on to our unsuspecting friends and family and maybe help it go viral.

Why Clickbait Is So Dangerous

What makes clickbait so insidious is that, according to the latest research, American adults are fooled by their headlines 75 percent of the time and believe that the headline is true and factual. This is very scary and explains, to a large degree, the great divide we see in our country today.

A recent study on how well students can research conducted by the Stamford Historian Education Group (SHEG) titled Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning was released in November 2016. The study of 7,804 student responses was conducted between January 2015 and June 2016 for students in middle school through college across 12 states. In summary, SHEG described students’ research ability as “bleak” based on the following:

More than 80 percent of middle school students believed that an advertisement, clearly identified by the words “sponsored content,” was a real news story.
Less than 20 percent of high school students used key details to notice that an unreliable source for a photograph was presented as evidence that nuclear radiation caused unusual growth.

I think all of us can agree that clickbait is something that we wish didn’t exist. It’s annoying and distracting. Even I, who consider myself a well-informed individual, find it hard to pull my eyes away from some of their headlines. And that’s why they are so powerful. They are created to appeal to our sense of curiosity, which makes them a natural for children and teens to click on.

The other thing that makes clickbait so dangerous, especially to students, is that it appears the most on social media sites. Since today’s youth practically live on social media, this means that they must be taught how to avoid clickbait and the problems it can cause. And because clickbait works, its use will only continue to grow.

What You Can Do

Here are some tips that something you are thinking about reading is not worth your time. If you follow them, you will easily be able to recognize clickbait when you see it.

The headline or title tells you nothing at all about the content of the article. For example “This Teacher Liked a Facebook Post; What Happened Next Is Awful.” Notice that the headline really doesn’t convey much about the story. What it does do is put a question into your brain: What happened to the teacher? They are counting on you wanting to know enough to click the link. Don’t!

The headline is too good to be true. I think my favorite example in this category is “17 Cats Who Should Be Running for President.” Really? Cats for president? What’s the point of this article? If it’s too ridiculous to be true, it’s too ridiculous to be true and isn’t worth your time.

The headline is in poor taste. Examples include “The Party Is Titanic!” and “10 Things Only People with Dysentery Will Understand.” Good journalists will not stoop to this type of headline. Enough said.

The headline is too funny, too positive, too terrifying, too exploitative, or too anything else. Headlines should simply tell what the story will be about. It is not their job to engender strong emotions. They are supposed to be simply stating the facts.

The headline follows a standard formula.

[?] tries to [?]. The reason why will make you [?]
[?] tries to [?]. You won’t BELIEVE what happened next!
This video will prove that [?]
10 [?] you should never [?] to [?]
X was Y. First you’ll be shocked, then you’ll be inspired
10 [?] that look like [?]
10 [?] that you won’t believe [?]

Teaching Students About Clickbait

Share the tips above with your students and have an honest discussion with them about the fallacies and dangers of clickbait. Then try some of the activities below to help them learn to recognize clickbait.

Have them take a familiar story, like The Three Little Pigs, and create some obviously clickbait headlines for the story, the stranger the better!
Provide them with two headlines for the same story and ask them to decide which one is the clickbait. My favorite example is this one: Headline #1: “You Won’t Believe What This 13-Year-Old Did on His Holidays!” Headline #2: “The Kid Who Climbed Mount Everest”
Have students use a headline generator, like the Link Bait Title Generator. Simply enter a topic, like “cats” and the generator will create numerous useless headlines. Discuss why it is so easy for a website to create so many headlines on one topic and what this says about the quality of the headlines being created.
Discuss with them why clickbait can be bad. Have them create a PSA using video, audio, drawings, or writing to warn others.
Take a historical event and write clickbait headlines for it. Then ask the students how these might color our view of the actual event if they were the only thing we knew.
Ask students to write clickbait headlines for common teaching moments. An example is “You have a test today. You won’t believe #17!”
Assign a different topic that you have studied in the past to each student and have them create a clickbait headline for it. Then have other students try to guess what the topic is.
With older students, have an honest discussion about what problems fake news stories, such as clickbait, can cause. Make sure to have examples handy.
Have students play the Factitious online game. a way to test their news sense.
Your high school students can try their hand at “spreading” fake news in this ten-minute online game from Cambridge social psychology professor Sander van der Linden. The goal of the game is to teach people how disinformation is made and spread.

All of us can become better and more informed purveyors of the news stories being provided to us, but it will take a little work on our part. How will you help your students become better at this?

This blog was updated with additional content on February 22, 2018.

May 7, 2017 0 comment