Thing 6 - Digital Citizenship

Bogus/Hoax Website Assignment

The first hoax site I selected to evaluate is: http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html (California’s Velcro crop under Challenge) This site can be easily detected as a hoax. To begin, most people know that Velcro is not grown as a crop. However, assuming that you do not, through examination of the site you will see that it is a personal webpage that is not hosted or created through a credible source. Upon researching the author you will find that his personal information is also very far-fetched. The page has definite reliability issues (no good contact methods on the main page, out of date information, no sources listed, etc.) Second hoax site:

The second site that I evaluated was: http://www.d-b.net/dti/ (Clones-R-Us) This site has a very credible look to the site. It is in a professional format, it has typical layout with things like FAQs, About Us, etc. However, upon closer inspection you will see that the actual information is quite fantastical. The about us section actually explains that the site is a spoof. Also, upon closer inspection you will see that once again, the site is a personal site with little credibility. Furthermore, there is no contact information and the site is fairly out of date.

I think this is a good activity for students to do because I find that even at the high school level, students are very poor judges of good material. Very often the first sites that they find are treated as the best or "accurate" material. I liked the sites that were listed as examples in the powerpoint. They were very good representations of different types of bogus material.

Two Digital Citizenship Activities:

#1 For my first activity I will try to get at the topic of online safety and predators. I will begin by giving students a quiz about their social networking habits. The number of hours on social networking sites, the number of friends on the site, the types of friends, the criteria for “friending” others, and other similar types of questions will be found on the quiz. After students have filled out the quiz (which will be in a Google form), then we will look at the answers as a class. Next, we will watch some videos about online safety (Dateline, etc.) Finally, we will discuss the risks and the ways to stay safe in online communications.

#2 My second topic is cyber-bullying. I have been teaching this topic at the high school level to meet the state standards, but I always feel like the students feel like it is a “lame” topic to discuss. As a result, I have been toying with the idea of setting up a fake cyber-bullying situation within my own class. My thought is that the day or two before the lesson I will target any students that are absent and then have them become the subject of a cyber-bullying situation which I have coordinated with the rest of the class. I will formulate some type of chat activity that everyone will be supposedly working on, but the victims will not be aware of the real focus of the activity. After a set amount of time, I will let the student(s) in on the activity and we will discuss how the activity made the students feel, the effects of this type of activity, etc. Then, I would follow up the lesson with some videos about the topic. I am somewhat worried that this idea could backfire. Thoughts?