ILP- webinar

For my independent learning project I listened to a webinar called “Making Online Student Safety a Priority” by Gaggle. There were 3 different speakers. In one of the sections called “Digital Citizenship: Fills the Digital Literacy Gap” I found out that youth aged 8-18 spend about 45% of their day exposed to media. To me, that’s crazy! In this section they talked about how students need to learn how to use technology wisely and competently. They also mentioned how important digital literacy skills are, and I strongly agree. But I also found out that teachers lack the easy-to-use tools needed to meet digital literacy standards. It is necessary that they learn professional development in digital literacy. In this same section, spoken by Diana Graber, she brings up topics that Digital Citizenship focuses on such as; online safety and security, online privacy, plagiarism, copyright, search strategies, and ethical decision-making. They also talked a lot about some of the statistics of use of social media with students. Towards the end they had a question and answer section. Listening to this webinar opened up my eyes to how much social media affects teenagers, good and bad. One of the negative things about social media they addressed was cyber bullying. I was never aware of how common cyber bullying was and I’m glad they took the time to address this very important issue. They are currently working on getting all schools to monitor the devices being use to send out these hateful comments. One of the callers, Rob, actually wanted to work with them. I really enjoyed listening to this webinar and I learned a lot! Here are a few screenshots from the webinar.