Edmonds Digital Learning

Students at all grade levels have an email address and default password to login to their GSuite account and the default password pattern is often taught in elementary grades. This helps students remember their password but it also poses a problem for students interested in accessing a classmate’s password to cause mischief. Here are 10 reasons teachers (yes, even elementary teachers!) should teach students how to reset the default password. Using a birthday chart posted on the wall, students can figure out someone’s password and access the account as an intruder. Intruders can make changes or delete work (this is where learning how to find the revision history on a Google doc comes in handy). Intruders can send malicious emails from someone’s account. Inappropriate docs or slides can be created by intruders. Intruders can destroy files. Intruders can do non-schoolwork searches from a classmate’s account. Intruders can access personal information. Intruders ...

When all news looks the same, how do you know if it is real? W alk into any coffee shop, sporting event, school, or other public venue in 2017 and you will likely find people accessing the Internet from various devices.  Whether people are accessing social media or searching Google, they will likely see headlines and images about news posted within the last few minutes or hours.   In fact, a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that one in four people receive their news online and 50% of the news accessed by 18-29 year olds comes from online sources.   Unlike TV or print, the Internet makes it possible to follow breaking news and updated stories 24/7.   The problem is that many people tend to accept the information posted online as true without looking beyond the surface and then with a simple click of the mouse the story spreads.   It should come as no surprise that a recent study of teenage students, conducted by Stanford U...

Common Sense Media have launched a new game that allows you to check your Digital (Moral) Compass.  Called Welcome to Anywhere , it allows students to explore real-life issues with social media, online peer pressure, self-image, and more. Using simple story paths, players take each character through a dilemma and see how their choices affect them.  Each "level" ends with a game of some sort (e.g. sorting statements into positive and negative online behaviours). It's a great way to look at consequences of online/offline decisions, and to show students how the divide between the real world and digital world is being eroded rapidly. The cute animation and overly moral tone will likely be a turn-off to high school students, but could always be used as a springboard for a project for students to design their own "choose your own adventure" story and game to teach younger students about issues they may face in high school.

In my last post , I mentioned the concept of "fair use," which is a term that many students think they understand, and many completely misunderstand, thinking that it gives them carte blanche over copyrighted content because they are a student. The video below explains the concept of fair use in a classroom-friendly way: In most cases, students are covered by fair use laws, until they decide to make their work public (ie. published on the web).  At that point, they need to ask themselves serious questions about the nature of their use of copyrighted works. Here are some tools that can help them decide: University of Minnesota: Thinking Through Fair Use -- a simple checklist to help students understand fair use. Fair Use Evaluator -- more in-depth resources to go deeper with copyright law. A solid bibliography will help students understand the ownership of the information they use.  The golden rule always should be: "if in doubt, leave it ou...

Guest post from AMS teacher, Dean Nakanishi : Unfortunately, I had to discover a new way to detect shared plagiarism within Hapara / Google Docs. If you suspect two students have shared significant portions of their essay with each other (but you can’t remember who paper #1 belonged to and you don’t want to go back and re-read 40 to find it)… Go to Hapara -> “Sharing” -> “All Docs” Copy a few sentences of suspected Paper #2  Click on the Search “magnifying glass” icon  Choose the drop down arrow to “Full Text Search” (instead of “Title Search”)  Paste in sample sentences and search class by class  It will eliminate students until you arrive at the class that had “sharer” of Paper #1  You can confirm that they shared by checking Sharing History  You can confirm the copy and paste by student #2 by checking Revision History (more details) to see how their essay “suddenly appeared”

Now that many of our students are publishing content beyond the walls of the classroom, we need to make them aware of real world consequences of content they are using. While it can be considered "fair use" to use copyrighted music in a class presentation, when that presentation hits the web, students can be subject to copyright infringement claims.  This rarely results in a lawsuit, but students can have requests for their material to be removed from a hosting site (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) -- too many requests and they can find themselves banned from publishing to these sites. Good digital citizens will try to find copyright-free content to use in the presentations (and cite correctly).  A great resource for this is the Creative Commons Search: http://search.creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons is a licensing system where content creators can allow for the use, re-use, and modification of their content (either with or without attribution). The search ...