Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Presenting an Internet Safety Program to Parents

It was two Tuesdays this past October when another teacher and I presented a program called the Wyoming Internet Safety Program for Parents. It was a pretty successful event--about 40 parents attended the first evening and I'd say that number increased to over 50 the second night. The feedback was very positive.

Planning for the event started at the end of the school year last year and continued through the summer with collaboration taking place on a Wikispaces wiki called Internet Safety for Parents. The wiki actually became a pretty good introduction to Internet safety as it combined the knowledge I was gaining by completing iSafe certification with the knowledge of my partner (who was already iSafe certified).

This post is for those thinking about planning an Internet safety program for their school community. Below are links to the various resources that we used in our program.

  • WISPP Introduction - A link to the five slide introduction I created on Thumbstacks, a site for creating online presentations.
  • WISPP Slideshow, Night 1 - Here is the whole slideshow from the first night that I uploaded to Slideshare. The slides are done in the Beyond Bullet Points format, so you won't get much information from them other than how we organized the presentation.
  • Ryan Halligan Story - Ryan Halligan was a 7th grader who experienced cyberbullying so severe that he decided to committ suicide. iSafe has a video that we downloaded and showed. Check this site for information about Ryan and cyberbullying.
  • Pew Internet & American Life Project - This site has lots of information about teen Internet usage that we used in our presentation.
  • Netsmartz.org Blog Beware Quiz - I took a few questions from this quiz and added them to the slideshow.
More tips:
  1. Include as many community groups that have an interest as possible. On the second night, we invited a counselor from the local youth services board to speak as well as some officers from the police department.
  2. Keep it short--our program lasted two hours, but took place over two nights instead of two very long hours in one night.
  3. Provide handouts.
  4. Keep up the momentum (if done well, your program will have parents to use the information right away). Parents at our program were given the chance to sign up for a listserve. The goal of the listserve is for us to send along any resources that we come across.
More resources will be posted to misterteacher.com soon.


More Symmetry in Nature Resources

I have added some new information and more printables to the Symmetry in Nature page of my website. You can now learn about the symmetry of leaves and print some worksheets that require students to complete some engaging symmetry activities.


Technorati Tags: | |

Check out: Spreadsheets in the Classroom | Classroom Blogs | Digital Cameras in the Classroom

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The resources you've listed here are invaluable to any parent seeking to educate themselves on the web, or teachers looking to develop an internet safety curriculum. I wish more people would follow your lead and seek out resources to help others - b/c the internet is not going anywhere any time soon and the sooner we can teach kids to interact with it in a safe way the better it will be for everyone. Have you heard of CyberTipline? It's run by NCMEC like NetSmartz and let's you report any cases of solicitation, misleading URLS, etc. Another good one to have on hand!

Anonymous said...

I am a school social worker in a middle school. The computer teacher and I put on avery successful Internet Safety Program for the parents and students last year. This year, we are expanding on this program to cover Cyberbullying. We are using resources from many agencies, etc. We feel strongly about including the Ryan Halligan story in what we show to he students (gr.7 and 8), however, there is concern over "triggering" students. Did you show this story to your students or only the parents? What are your feelings on this topic? Do you know of any research that shows whether or not tis kind of content would trigger the children to "copycat," etc? And, are you a teacher, administrator, or mental health professional? Thank you so much for this site!

misterteacher said...

I am a teacher and I have no idea if students would want to copy what they have seen in the video (there is a video on the iSafe website). Our program was just for parents.

Miguel Guhlin (@mGuhlin) said...

Thanks for sharing! I'm going to explore them a bit more. In reviewing your Symmetry page, I noticed that the word "symmetry" is mis-spelled and I had to correct the link. THought you might want to take care of that...

Thanks again for sharing,

Miguel Guhlin