Elementary Students Learn Important Lessons About Digital Safety
To help mark Digital Citizenship Week, Hendrick Hudson elementary students learned and discussed best practices to remain safe in a digital world.
Digital Citizenship Week is dedicated each year to promoting the safe, responsible and ethical use of technology. Those important principles were at the heart of lessons in STEAM classes at Buchanan-Verplanck, Frank G. Lindsey and Furnace Woods Elementary Schools this week, both sparking discussion and providing the impetus for fun exercises.
“We want them to think about the difference between the sort of things you can share online, and those that you can’t,” Buchanan-Verplanck STEAM teacher Catherine Holzman said. “Some things are really private and personal. We want them to be able to delineate what falls into these categories.”
The younger elementary students at Buchanan-Verplanck and Furnace Woods began their lessons discussing how and why we must think before posting anything online. They discussed what footprints are, and compared physical footprints left by an animal or a human on a beach, for instance, and digital footprints, which can’t be washed away by rain or a wave.
“Everything you post online is permanent,” Furnace Woods STEAM teacher Alexa Malave told her students. “We have to pay attention to what we are posting. Is it personal? Is it true?”
Mrs. Holzman and Ms. Malave led a discussion about what they could and couldn’t share online and why. Afterward, each class participated in group exercises with examples of what can and cannot add to the digital footprintl of a person or, at Furnace Woods, a furry character.
At Frank G. Lindsey, older elementary students delved into messages and how they can be construed differently online or through text compared to in person. The students reviewed several text messages with their teacher, Rachel Naraine, and talked as a class about how the message could have been delivered more clearly.
“In person, looking at someone’s face, listening to their voice, or watching their body language can give away their meaning,” Ms. Naraine said. “Via text, we don’t know those things, and it can lead to a misunderstanding.”
Afterward, the students logged into the district’s AI platform, School AI, and held their own discussions on “Texting George.” They were tasked with having an online conversation with George, an AI character, and gathering information through appropriate questions to determine George’s true feelings.
“Their worlds are based around the internet,” Mrs. Holzman said. “We want them to understand that they will have to be much more careful than we ever had to be.”