Online Dangers and Cyber Safety

Around 43 per cent of people with internet access have online ‘friends’ they have never met in real life (Kaspersky Lab, 2011).

Although the Internet is a great way to interact socially with friends and family and is also a great educational tool, it has opened up a whole new world, allowing information and connections to be sourced in ways unimaginable a few years ago. However the Internet can be a dangerous place. Parents and teachers are often unaware of online dangers and it is important for them to find out what the most significant online dangers are and how to deal with them.

  

Some of the significant online dangers include:

Cyber bullying: This includes threats, insults and other malicious behaviour that is spread across the Internet by email/instant messaging/social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter.

Inappropriate content: This varies depending on age/network/parents etc, however inappropriate content tends to refer to sites that contain unsuitable content for children This can refer to pornography, gun sites, drug taking etc.

Data Theft: Children my unknowingly have personal information displayed about themselves and their family, making it easier for online predators to access information about them.

Predators: This is probably the most worrying and is the most talked about online danger. Predators typically pretend to be a young person and befriend another young person through the Internet and then gather personal information about them.

Whilst many children are more than capable of using computer and Internet technology, they don’t always understand the online dangers that are around and the implications that they can have. Therefore children who are online users should be warned about this for their own personal safety and to put parents and teachers minds a bit more at ease.

Multiliteracies

Literacy involves gaining the skills and knowledge to read and interpret varying texts and artifacts, and to successfully navigate and negotiate their challenges, conflicts and crises. To the domains of reading, writing, and traditional print literacies, one could argue that in an era of technological revolution, educators must develop robust forms of media literacy, computer literacy, and multimedia literacies, thus cultivating “multi-literacies.”

-Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, “Media Literacy in the US”

Literacy is defined as “The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts" (Literacy, 2007). However, our society is filled with technology such as computers, phones, etc and to be able to participate and engage in this new technological world, writing and reading, although still very important, is not enough.

From what I have read, my take on multiliteracies is that there is more focus on incorporating other aspects of literacy such as visual, audio, images, symbols etc into literacy learning and this is due to the fact that we know live in a technological society where children are using multiliteracies in everyday life, inside and outside the classroom.

Some examples of using multiliteracies in the classroom include:

Digital story telling:

With digital storytelling, students can are able to improve muliteracy skills, show their creativity and also it gives them a voice.

Storybird is a great website where you can see digital stories written by others and it also helps you to create your own stories: http://storybird.com/

Podcasting:

Podcasts allow teachers to provide educational material either for revision or homework so that students can download and use the information at a time that suits them. It is also great for students to share learning experiences.