CyberSafety at the Community Transition School

Technology Support Teacher, Alexis Oosting of the Community Transition School has been working with her high school students to educate them about cybersafety. The first topic that they explored was intellectual property and copyright. She started with a background of what intellectual property and copyright are as well as how they are related to plagiarism. She then incorporated the lesson into the school’s unit on entrepreneurship. She used stories about illegal file sharing court cases and quotes from famous artists about the issue. She then had students support or ague against the issue of whether or not file sharing is copyright infringement. This type of lesson might become more and more important as record companies begin to seek monetary retribution from people who illegally share music files online. In a precedent setting verdict handed down by a federal jury earlier this month, a Minnesota woman was ordered to pay $222,000 for sharing copyrighted music online through the Peer 2 Peer sharing network, Kazaa.

Alexis also taught a lesson around online predators and personal identity theft. She told me that the students watched some video clips from iSAFE and discussed the dangers of giving out too much information on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. She also did a jigsaw activity about different internet safety tips. She told me that she was personally surprised at the amount of her students who told her that they have or know someone who has met up with people they met over MySpace. Unfortunately, some children put themselves into danger by chatting with strangers and then meeting them offline. One example of this was in a Boston Globe article today in which a 13 year old girl was allegedly assaulted after meeting a 20 year old college student with whom she had been chatting with online. He allegedly told her that he was 16 years old.

If you have a lesson or internet safety event that you want to share with the BPS community, please email me with the details at rkidd@boston.k12.ma.us .