Digital Safety

The availability of technology is accessible more than ever in today's society. Two-year olds are able to utilize iPads to watch video's on Youtube or use various applications to play games. Motor vehicles can connect to cellular devices to make calls easier and play music directly from the phone. Classrooms have smart boards and students have access to computers with internet. With everything being so easily accessible through technology, anyone is prone to various dangers the tech world comes with, especially younger users. As a future Secondary English Education major, I have to be aware of these dangers so that I can educate my students about them especially when they write essays, do research assignments, and just overall practice safety.
National Children's Advocacy Center provides safety tips for kids and teens and it is a great source for simple things to keep in mind. These tips emphasizes on parental involvement. Internet safety starts at home and parents are key factors in helping with internet safety. However, not many parents themselves are aware of these things, or even know how to operate a computer especially older parents. Edutopia gives an idea of how important this is. So in order to ensure digital safety among students, teachers need to offer some kind of digital safety awareness for parents. Most have smartphones, so a suggestion would be to have resources such as links available for parents to read. A great source would be Stay Safe Online. It not only offers great tips to follow for parents, but provides many other resources.
This Digital Safety assignment for Technology Education enlightened us all in the different areas of the issues we may encounter. There is so much to keep in mind, and as future educators being in a technologically literate world can be complicated. I wasn't even aware of "Phishing and Pharming" was. I knew never to give out personal information to unknown sources, but there are deeper dangers where sites can be modified to direct you to the unknown. My group was assigned to do Copy Right and Fair User Practice. We used Emaze and iMovie to present our content with little complications along the way. The only problem with Emaze for group presentations is that only the person under the account can edit the presentation. Copy right was always around us especially in English courses i've taken because writing papers involved being aware of who has done the original work. I wasn't aware of what Fair User Practice was, which is basically similar to copy right, but with certain guidelines to prevent violating copy right laws. Teachers alone have special copy right laws that give a little more leeway than the norm.
All the topics presented in class were very helpful. Aside from fair user practice and copy right issues, Digital Safety and Privacy, Cyber Bullying, Textual Harrasment, and Pharming and Pishing are important categories to keep in mind when practicing digital safety because they all correlate with one another. Bullying and fraud is one of the many issues teachers, parents, and students need to be aware of. These topics can be taught more in depth and though I did learn a lot from the class presentations, I feel that they lacked more information. Groups could have used the whole class time to present on their topics.
Overall digital safety is very important to practice to prevent dangers in the technology world. everything is easily accessed not only for the user, but predators can get to these users. Teachers need to be highly aware of these things and help both parents and students to protect themselves.

 National Children's Advocacy Center. (n.d.). Retrieved May 14, 2016, from http://www.nationalcac.org/prevention/internet-safety-kids.html

 Raising Digital Citizens | StaySafeOnline.org. (n.d.). Retrieved May 14, 2016, from https://staysafeonline.org/stay-safe-online/for-parents/raising-digital-citizens

 The Importance of Internet Safety. (2012). Retrieved May 14, 2016, from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/internet-safety-importance-heather-wolpert-gawron