ILP Participation: Webinar

I attended a Webinar called ""Making Online Student Safety a Priority”. This was a very interesting webinar and I feel like I learned a lot. There were three speakers, Diana Graber, Luann Hughs, and Kathy Boehle. Diana is the co founder of Cyberwise. Luann is the Director of technology for Temple ISD and Kathy is the manager of Gaggle. They started out the webinar telling us facts about youth these days like that 96% of teens use social media. They also told us that 67% of teens have sent or received sexually suggestive content which is a scary fact. 90% of children the ages 8-16 have seen porn online and 65% of children ages 8-14 have been involved in cyberbullying incidents. 

Experts agree that the digital skills kids need most are social and behavioral skills. Digital citizenship focuses on these skills. This includes plagiarism, sexting, digital drama, and online privacy. Students need help learning how to use technology wisely. A lot of teachers lack easy-to-use tools to meet digital literacy standards. The solution for this is Cyber Civics which is a three year digital media literacy program for middle schoolers that meets an urgent and growing need to prepare students with skill to be ethical, competent, and empowered digital citizens. 

Kathy Boehle then starts talking about Gaggle which is the leading provider of communication collaboration. She gives us scary facts about how 1 student a month responds to ads on Craigslist for sex. Gaggle also detects Facebook groups with violent content. With the use of Gaggle, they began to see an increase in children looking for help from the Gaggle team. 

I learned a lot about internet safety from this Webinar and I also learned a lot of scary facts surrounding children and the internet. A lot of these programs the speakers spoke on could be very beneficial for any school or home. It was interesting to learn about these programs and I am glad I tuned into this Webinar.