Reflection #5 – Week 6

This week we were given the opportunity to attend two professional development sessions presented by Focused Ed. Focused Ed is a website that provides many digital literacy resources to educators, students, and guardians. The two sessions that I attended were on cybersecurity, as well as privacy essentials.

The first session I attended was on cybersecurity, delivered by Mike Silverton. In the session he talked about how the cybersecurity material on Focused Ed is good for everyone, not just students, and was created and written by teachers in Ontario. There are various types of resources that can be found under this section. The section is developed by Fortinet Security Awareness and is laid out in an instructional model where it provides resources such as videos, assessments, project ideas, additional resources that teachers can look at to expand their knowledge, and even full lesson plans. Not only does it provide these options, but it also breaks everything down into appropriate age and grade levels (grades 2/3 up to grade 12). The website also breaks the lessons down further into different cybersecurity topics so that they can be covered across multiple days. Each lesson plan includes downloadable resources such as a pre-made, customizable powerpoint slide show, ready to teach student handouts and activities, and a teacher guide. The teacher guide provides teachers with background information that they should know, curriculum connections, references, answer guides, time estimates for the lessons/activities, as well as talking points and check-in questions that they can ask students. Mike also briefly mentioned ClickView as being a solid option for teaching cybersecurity awareness as it provides similar resources. However, Fortinet is more in depth.

The second session that I attended was on privacy essentials, delivered by Jasmine Lee and Mike Silverton. The session started off with Jasmine telling us about FIPPA which focuses on collection, use, disclosure, storage, and access to personal information. She explained how it records information that identifies people such as name, age, birthdate, address, SIN number and others along those lines. She also talked about the mosaic effect which I had never heard of before. The mosaic effect is the idea that a piece of information on its own wouldn’t be able to identify someone, but if it was paired with other information, a person would then become identifiable. Another thing that was covered was privacy impact assessments (PIAs). PIAs identify privacy risks early, ensure that personal information is managed responsibly, and can inform people about the potential usage and collection of their data. They evaluate people on content creation, sharing, data residency, data retention, security, and risks that may occur. Jasmine also described the difference between user information (information used to create an account – email, name, password) and user content (personal information about oneself). She then went on to explain the different section meanings (26 = collection, 30 = protection/disclosure, 32 = use) and how to best protect your privacy online. She recommended using non-identifiable information, opt out of things when possible, delete information/accounts, give as little information as possible, and don’t share information with large audiences. The second half of the session Mike talked about how the topic of privacy can be brought into a classroom. From a curricular stand point, teaching about privacy allows students to evaluate imapcts of digital tools, learn their rights and responsibilities, and learn about healthy relationships as well as personal safety. The differences between FOIPPA (governing all student info), PIPPA (third-party apps and private organizations), and PIPEDA (daily used commercial platforms – social media) were given. FOIPPA and PIPPA are provincial, and PIPEDA is federal. Mike talked about the importance of being a teacher and teaching privacy to students. The best way to help students is to model it, teach age-appropriate lessons on it, make sure what you are teaching is district approved, and avoid requiring technology in the classroom (have non-tech options). Towards the end of the session, he provided a bunch of great resources that can be used in the classroom, some of which I remember doing myself when I was in elementary school. Some resources that were recommended are Privacy Pirates (interactive game), Safety in My Online Neighbourhood (videos, discussion activities), Fortinet Security Awareness, Social Smarts: Nothing Personal (graphic novel, discussion guide), and ClickView (teacher packs, resources, questions, videos, activities).

Overall, these sessions were very informative and I can absolutely see myself using these resources in my classroom in the future. After attending the two sessions I feel much more comfortable being able to teach digital literacy, specifically about cybersecurity and privacy awareness, something I was unsure of doing before this semester.