Tag: digital citizenship

Posted on

Sexting, the conversation we need to have.

Often, it’s the difficult conversations that are never tackled. And yet, more often than not, they are the most important conversations we need to have. When you’re a teacher, having honest, up front conversations related to adolescent behaviour and sexual curiosity are sometimes uncomfortable for both yourself, and your students. But these conversations are necessary. Sometimes, it’s the only time a student will be offered advice from an adult concerned for their welfare.

Today, I had one of these conversations. It wasn’t one to one advice, it was an address to our Year 11 cohort, and the topic was sexting. When I told them we were going to be discussing this today, there was an uneasy rustling in their seats. I assured them that I knew they were probably feeling a tad uncomfortable about our topic, and I let them know that I wasn’t totally at ease myself, but that I thought it was important that I impart information they need to know.

I didn’t use a slideshow for this presentation. What we did was look at some recent published articles from online newspapers that made the complexities of the situation pretty clear. But first, we began with the law as it stands in Victoria today, using information from the Victoria Legal Aid site. The language used is not legal speak; it’s clear cut and simple for them to grasp. Here are the sections we looked at today.

Child pornography

You could be charged by the police with producing child pornography if:

  • you take a nude or semi-nude picture of a person under 18, even if they are your friend and consent (agree) to the picture being taken
  • you take photos or video of a person under 18 involved in sexual activity or posing in an indecent sexual manner (or who looks like they are).

You could also be charged with possessing child pornography if you go onto the internet and download pornography showing people under 18.

If you put a pornographic photo or video on the internet or your phone, print a photo, or email or text it to a friend, you could be charged with publishing or transmitting child pornography. You could be charged even if you are the same age or younger than the person in the picture or video.

People found guilty of sexual offences or child pornography are stopped from working or volunteering with children – for example, as a teacher or a sports coach – or volunteering with children.

Mobile phone pictures and the risks of ‘sexting

’‘Sexting’ or sending ’sext messages’ is where nude and/or sexual images are taken on a mobile phone, often by young people and their friends. This is a crime if the photo includes a person under 18. Sexting is already leading to young people being charged by police with child pornography offences.

Think carefully about the consequences of taking or sending pictures of your friends on your mobile phone, especially if they are not fully dressed and even if they agree. You could be charged by police for committing a criminal offence.

It may seem like harmless fun, but be careful – once you send pictures electronically they can become part of your ‘digital footprint’ and this lasts forever. It could damage your future career prospects or relationships.

Victoria Legal Aid

From the reactions of the students, it was pretty clear most of them had not much of an idea of the legal ramifications of actions detailed above, particularly the receiving and forwarding on of images via mobile phones. I let them know I shared their concern about the punitive nature of the law as it stands, and the serious impact on a person’s digital footprint and work prospects if they are charged with a child pornography offence. To illustrate its effect, I explained how a 17 year old who might want to be a teacher, would not be able to complete their degree if they had been charged, as they would be unable to obtain a working with children check. They would not be able to enter a school to complete a teaching placement.

We then looked at three recent articles, one from the New York Times, and two from The Age, one of Victoria’s daily newspapers.

A girl’s nude photo, and altered lives – New York Times article

Teen sexting: it’s illegal, but it’s in every high school – The Age

‘Sexting’ youths placed on sex offenders register – The Age

These stories were enough to cement the learning intentions of this session. I would think it fair to say that the majority of students learned a great deal today and went home with much food for thought.

Honest, up front discussions like these form part of our responsibility to create effective digital citizens out of the teenagers in our care. Are you having these conversations in your schools today? If you aren’t, perhaps use the above information as your guide.  We may not agree with the legislation, but it exists, and our young people need to be informed. We really can’t afford to have our young people unnecessarily punished due to a lack of understanding about the ramifications of their actions.

Posted on

Nurturing their Digital Footprint – lessons for Year 12

As part of our continued push to acknowledge the importance of Cybersafety instruction at my school, today I delivered a presentation to our Yr 12 students about how they can nurture their digital profile. Just a month or so ago, we delivered presentations to our Yr 10 and 11 students about much the same thing, but on this occasion, we created an entirely new presentation. There was a need to. Facebook privacy settings had changed, and this group are on the verge of adulthood. Very soon they will be moving into tertiary education or the paid workforce.

Quite a bit of material used in the presentation came from Jefferey Rosen’s excellent article in the New York Times, ‘The Web Means the End of Forgetting‘. I’d highly recommend that you take up the free subscription offer from the New York Times to gain access to this fine piece. It certainly helped to pull together a presentation that I think had meaning for the students present. In fact, I received an email 15 minutes after the presentation had ended from one of the students. Here’s what she had to say;

Hi Mrs Luca J
Just wanted to say I thought your lecture this afternoon was fantastic.
Walking out of the lecture theatre,  everyone was talking about their (sic) going straight home to change their facebook settings!
So yes, thanks for an interesting lecture,

It’s not often you get positive feedback like this. It certainly made me feel like the effort required to put the presentation together was worth it. If you’d like to view it, go to the wikispaces site I maintain.

Helping our students to understand the importance of a positive digital profile is ongoing work for us. I firmly believe that probably the best way to enable our students to appreciate its importance is to encourage them to publish their work online, so that they can be building the profile that will be of most benefit to them in the long run. As Seth Godin said;

“Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.”

I have my students working with new technologies and encourage them to publish the good stuff. The hard thing is convincing others that this is something we should be working towards in our schools. They deserve to know how they can make the best of the Web and themselves in the process.

(*Frustratingly, once again, the Sliderocket presentation will not embed into this post.)

Posted on

NECC musings.

Today’s the first ‘working’ day of my school holidays and I’ve been sitting here musing about the NECC conference that is taking place in San Antonio, Texas over the coming weekend. A group of Australian educators are leaving on a tour today that takes in this conference and I am envious that I’m not travelling with them. After blogging for nearly six months I feel such a part of this network of learning and feel that I’m going to miss so much by not being in attendance. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t follow through and write a proposal to my school asking that I be permitted to attend. It was a possibility, but I quite literally couldn’t find the time to get it done. It sounds ridiculous, but I really don’t feel like I’ve had a spare minute in five and a half months -there was always something more pressing that needed doing and so here I am, musing about what might have been! 

I don’t think I really need to worry – my network knows I’m here and I’m sure much from the conference is going to be fed out virtually to those of us watching from the fringes. Vicki Davis has just posted about her Cool Cat Teacher’s PLN      that she has very kindly set up which will feed a lot of info to those of us not attending. There’s an NECC 2008 tab where you can track info feeding out of the conference. Vicki has uploaded a presentation that she and Julie Lindsay (an Australian expat working in Qatar) are going to be sharing at the conference. It’s about Digital Citizenship and all going well it should be embedded here.  


 

Lisa Parisi has just written a great reflective post about how we bring others with us as we learn to integrate technology to support the learning in our schools and her feelings about attending NECC for the first time. It’s well worth reading.  I love what she has to say about risk and how failure makes us better at what we do – it echoes a post I wrote recently about similar sentiments.   

So, to all of you out there lucky enough to be experiencing NECC physically, not virtually, I wish you well. Soak it up! 

Posted on

From little things big things grow

Funny how life is isn’t it. Sometimes a smallish idea can manifest into something that could be great. Sue Tapp set up a Flash meeting tonight for Oz educators as an  opportunity to touch base and make some connections outside of our blogs and twitter. She planted a seed and didn’t even know it. It was great and I want to publicly thank Sue for making the effort to get this meeting organised – 20 people participated and it was useful but we did have problems with the setup. This led to the always thinking Sue Waters moving to ustream and then elluminate to see if they worked any better.

Once in elluminate the seed started to grow. I came in late after attending to homework and kid’s bedtime and the discussion was in full swing. Vicki Davis was acting as moderator with Sue Waters and the discussion focused on  digital citizenship and the best way we could educate our students, parents, colleagues, administrators and education departments about the value of participating as global citizens via digital means.  As a reult of the discussion, a Google group has been set up  – Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety and Success. If you’re a Teacher-Librarian join and contribute to the discussion. This is an area where TLs should be active and an active TL is their own best advocate. We don’t need policy documents drawn up to prove our worth -we need to be active in our schools and leading the charge in terms of modelling and no-one will question the need for TLs in schools.

There was a lot of energy in the session and twitter talk was buzzing afterwards. It’s promising to have a global group forming and will give people an avenue through which ideas can be shared which may affect perception and initiate education and change. Let’s see what kind of tree grows from the small seed. (Being an Aussie seed it’s bound to be a eucalypt – huge with lots of vigorous growth!)