For our second meeting, students were introduced to the concept of internet safety. Here is the handout from our meeting:

Internet Safety

The Internet is a very PUBLIC PLACE. It is like the mall, or a parade, or the airport. People are moving in and out, and you are always bumping into someone you don’t know!

A few simple rules will help you be safe while on the Internet. These rules will help you be safe anywhere!

1. Never give out your real name. Keep this a secret. Make up a new name that you will use whenever you are on the Internet. Keep the names of your parents and family a secret too.

2. Never give out your address or where you go to school. Keep information about where you live PRIVATE.

3. Think about yourself on the Internet as a kind of everyday superhero. Hide your true identity! Always use an AVATAR to represent yourself on the Internet. An avatar is a picture or drawing that is unique to your personality but doesn’t look like you. When playing video or online games, the game gives you a character to play. This is an example of an ‘avatar:

4. Do not talk to strangers – even email or chat! - unless your teacher, parent or guardian has introduced you to them.

5. Do not open SPAM. You never know who sends you spam, so it could hurt your computer – and you!

Try this Internet Safety Game and see how well you understand these rules! http://www.att.com/Common/images/safety/game.html

 

Avatar Design

Connected to the idea that effective internet safety is comparable to having a ’secret identity’, we worked on creating an avatar - a graphical representation of your self - for this blog. We used the program free to PCs called Microsoft Paint.

Painting a Digital Image Using “Microsoft Paint”

Open up the program called “Microsoft Paint”. Do you know how to find a program on your computer? If not, try this:

How to find a program on your computer:

1. Click ‘Start’ one time. ‘Start’ can be found in the lower left hand side of your screen.

2. Click ‘Search’ one time. ‘Search’ is the picture of the magnifying glass.

3. Click on ‘search all files and folders’

4. Type in your search word: “paint”. What results come up? Paint is a program with a name that ends in “.exe”. Can you find any search results with the file name that ends in “.exe”?

Once you are in Microsoft Paint, open the digital image file you will be using as your avatar. To do this:

1. Move your mouse to “File” and click once

2. Drag your mouse to “Open” and click once

3. “Browse” through the files on your computer to find the “Desktop” Do you know how to Browse and locate files on your computer?

4. Find your picture and open it using the program Microsoft Paint

In Paint, you will see a “Toolbar.” What is a “toolbar”? The toolbar has different ‘tools’ you can use to paint your picture. What are your favorite tools? Are there any tools you don’t understand how to use, or what they do?

After talking about Internet safety and avatars, students opened pictures of themselves taken the previous week and ‘painted’ them as one way of designing their own avatar. Here are a few from the class:

 

With the introduction of internet safety, we took one step closer toward this blog, in addition to increased competency in basic concepts and understanding as outlined bythe International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards (NETS). These basic concepts include keyboarding skills and mouse control, the ability to solve computer-related problems, and windows and some transmedia navigation. Students searched for a program, opened a file using a selected program (including browsing for the desired file), explored and manipulated a graphics program toolbox, and saved a file to the desktop.