Cyber safety website
Level: Year 11
School: Riccarton High School
Teacher: Tricia Winter
Category: Teaching strategy
Year 11 Digital Technologies (DT) students created websites about cyber safety during an eight-week unit.
Background
Riccarton High School students take a compulsory Technology course in Year 9, with DT available in Year 10 as a half or full-year option course. Although there are pre-requisites for Year 11 DT, admission to the course can be at the HOD's discretion. Most of the students in the two Year 11 DT classes come in without any experience in creating a website, although there are varying levels of expertise.
DT Teacher Tricia Winter joined Riccarton High School in Term 3, 2011. At that stage her Year 11s had worked on desktop publishing, spreadsheets, and word processing in preparation for creating a website in Term 4. The students brainstormed ideas and decided to create websites about cyber safety. This context, Tricia says, is particularly apt because most students use social media sites but often don't recognise the outcome of their actions in an electronic world – that what they do might be there forever.
Incorporating generic Technology
Tricia is enthusiastic about bringing generic Technology knowledge to the specialist DT skills and knowledge her students learn. She reinforces knowledge learnt in junior Technology and introduces new concepts, all of which serves to support the students as they work through the DT curriculum. Tricia also introduced e-format portfolios for students to present their work.
Setting up the unit
Students were given a brief which required them to: 'Create a website about cyber safety and correct computer ethics for a general audience'. They had to create four pages: index (home page), computer ethics, cyber safety and glossary. Tricia emphasised that everything on the website must be original, with any information used from other sources reworded. The Year 11 dean and two school counsellors acted as stakeholders, coming in to the classroom to discuss their needs with the students. They gave the students good feedback and were impressed with their results, with one noting that the websites would be useful in her counselling role.
The amount of work involved in the project seemed quite daunting to many of the students, with some wondering if they would be able to complete everything. To support them through this stage, Tricia discussed constraints, explaining that barriers to learning might include time management, lack of knowledge and/or over-commitment, and that they needed to work around these. "Students have to identify their own constraints, with time management being the usual one. I told them not to focus on the problem but look at the issue and work out what they were going to do about it. Shifting your mindset from the problem to the solution makes the work become easier because it's solution-based".
Resources
Tricia directed her students to Microsoft's Own Your Own Space Teen Book which covers aspects of the internet such as security, using social sites, spam and bullying. She also introduced the students to new software, such as Microsoft Expressions – this includes a supplementary online tutorial from which they learnt how to use the program. As part of the technological process, Tricia expects students to research software that they might want to use. She also referred the class to YouTube, suggesting they find "mini videos" to incorporate into their websites.
Tricia encouraged students to find software suitable for their project and to share it with the class. Explaining that teachers don't have time to learn every program, she suggested that those with expertise in a specific program should, as the class expert, teach everyone, including herself, how to use it. This resulted in some good class interaction as students learnt from each other how to work with, for example, Voki and some areas of Microsoft Expression Web.
Delivery
The class looked at web design together and shared useful resources, while working on their individual websites. Students researched various aspects of cyber safety and asked stakeholders such as family and peers for their views. After developing their concept designs they asked stakeholders for feedback on their logo, colours, layout and content.
Tayla Styles chose an image of herself as the logo for her website, using a cartoon sketch she had asked her grandfather to create. The figure is wearing safety clothing, symbolising the purpose of the website. Part-way through her development, Tayla realised 'she' was facing away from the text. To change this, she taught herself to scan an image and put it into another program, learnt to use that program and then flipped the image to face inwards. During her research, Tayla found some educational games on cyber safety and tested two - www.hectorsworld.com and www.cyberkids.co.nz – Tayla comments that although she found the project very difficult she enjoyed working on it and things became easier towards the end.
Elliot Mckenzie admits that at the beginning of the term he didn't think he'd learn how to make a website: "But I did and it was really fun learning to do it.". He thought it would be better if people could listen to information rather than having lots of text, so created a Voki avatar, 'Paul', who narrated the content.
Sally Yep also wondered if she would ever finish her website, but in her evaluation says she is proud of her outcome and pleased with the knowledge and skills she learnt from the experience. Sally created a handprint logo, with hands in different colours to represent the two genders, positioned to represent people uniting over cyber safety.
In contrast, Lucy Hayle brought prior knowledge to the process because she had created a website before. However, she says, being required to create a website for a specific purpose and audience made her think more about how she was creating it.
Curriculum links
As well as generic Technology strands, the students worked on DT components:
- Knowledge of Digital Information Management
- Apply Digital Information Management Tools to Create an Outcome
- Knowledge of Digital Media
- Create a Digital Media Outcome
- Knowledge of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The students didn't do much of the software engineering aspect. However, Tricia plans to go into more depth in this component next time. Some of the more proficient students also worked on the Design a Software Program Structure component. One decided that his program wasn't working as he wanted, so went to the coding to find out why and did his own coding for the website.
Tricia notes that the research aspect of the work is important: "Once students begin finding answers, they start to get on board more because 'It's not as difficult as I thought'". Students were working at Level 4-5 at the beginning of the unit, she says, but progressed considerably and by the end most were at Level 6. Students who moved on to Year 12 brought not only their DT experience but also the technological literacy they had learnt during the project.
Challenges
2011 was a challenging year for Canterbury students. Although the 22 February earthquake didn't cause as much damage to Riccarton High School as the worst-hit schools, it did mean the school was closed for a while for assessment. Tricia says that the aftershocks continuing throughout the year took a toll on students and that they were still "pretty raw" when she arrived. "Even a heavy gust of wind gets a reaction, and hearts start pounding". School was also closed for a week during a heavy snowfall in July.
To compensate for lost time, Tricia scheduled lots of tutorials at lunchtimes and after school, although she had to allow for other subject teachers doing the same. She also shifted deadlines, to help students keep up with their work. Tricia compares the students' experience to that of 'real world' development processes where things happen that weren't planned for, creating new constraints. Discussion around this, she says, contributed to the ongoing "rich dialogue" in a Technology classroom.
Outcomes
As the students worked through their development they began to see how all the Technology aspects they had discussed fitted together in practice. Time management was an issue for most, but every student completed the work and was satisfied with their outcome. One student summed the experience up as: "This isn't as hard as I thought it would be; it's just a lot of work, a lot of thinking."
Student achievement was recognised in NCEA results which included a number of Excellence and Merit endorsements. Tricia was also rewarded with watching her students grow in confidence: "An as educator, it's a privilege watching the light being switched on and students enjoying what they're doing.".
What next?
Tricia will repeat the unit in 2012. She won't plan a new context for it, however, until she gets a 'feel' for her classes, student interest and abilities.
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