Interesting post and comments on Weblogg-ed. It’s about new literacies, cyber-bullying and the roles of teachers and parents, the curriculum, etc… The comments are full of good links and stuff. Worth a look.
I tried to post this as a comment to the post, but couldn’t. So I’ve posted here instead.
First up, it made me think of the Byron Review Report commissioned by the UK Prime Minister: Safer Children in a Digital World I can highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it before. I particularly like this quote:
“Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.”
Second, I thought of a course a colleague’s just written. We were recently given the opportunity to write a teacher training course in ‘Media Literacy’ for teachers in Singapore schools. One of the main focuses of the course is to develop knowledge and skills to enable the critical evaluation of different types of content across the different media available today. Helping teachers to empower children by helping them to understand, assess and manage risks – so they can make better choices.
Third, I thought of another colleague who’s helping secondary students to use blogs responsibly, by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than they’d resorted to before. link to e-wot post
The last two aren’t a direct attempt to ‘teach’ ‘cyber-wellness’, instead they do something which I think is more powerful. They help develop the literacies which are the foundations of better risk management and self-regulation.
