Category: Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety
curricular area and keeping learners safer online
Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety for secondary teachers
Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety for primary teachers
Parents’ Cyber First Aid Box
The Cyber First Aid Box is designed to support families recover from online harms.
Designed in partnership with Decode Cyber Solutions and Education Scotland’s Digital Skills team – it is a free resource available to everyone.
Clicking on the image or link will open a new browser tab to the Cyber First Aid Box website. The site will ask a series of questions to help families determine the best response to a harmful online incident, including how to approach the subject with children & young people, possible solutions, and the first steps to recovering from it.
Save the Pacific Northwest tree octopus activity
What next?
Hopefully, you spotted the clues that the tree octopus isn’t real pretty quickly and pointed this out to your teacher!
We think that by learning some of the skills used to make the fake info on this website, you’ll be better prepared to spot other info like this and know how to check it for accuracy.
We want you to create your own fake animal awareness campaign. You’ll need to think of an animal and then imagine it living in a biome, or habitat, that isn’t it’s natural home… like a mountain-dwelling narwhal or Arctic elephant!
Then you’ll need some facts that sound believable, even though they’re not true – so things like what your imaginary animal eats, where it sleeps and how big it is.
Finally, you’ll create some online content, maybe using slides, websites, blogs or even a video.
You can share these with us on twitter: @DigiLearnScot
Activity 1 – fact finding and note making
- Use your web browser to find out three (or more) facts about an animal
- Then pick a biome it wouldn’t normally live in and find out three facts about that place and how animals normally survive there
- Make notes of this info as you go – it’ll come in handy later
teachers might want to use some of these ideas to expand upon the features of fake news and unreliable sources:
Digital Media Literacy: The Blur Between Facts and Opinions in the Media (gcfglobal.org)
Activity 2 – photo manipulation
The photos on the octopus site were faked and so are many other photos online and in newspapers and magazines too.
Read this page to find out more about manipulated photos
You don’t need fancy software to edit photos, here are some tips:
PowerPoint – remove background
Keynote – instant alpha
- Start with a background photo of the place your imaginary animal is going to live – add it to your app
- Then add the photo of your animal
- Now, use either the remove background in PowerPoint or instant alpha in Keynote, for example, to cut out any background on your animal picture
- It should now look like your animal lives in the place you have as the background
Here’s my mountain-dwelling narwhal from earlier:
Activity 3 – making fake news
You now have an imaginary animal, some facts about it and a photo proving its existence – now all you need to do is put it together and share it with the world to convince them of it’s existence!
You could have a look at these:
https://www.beano.com/games/random-animal-mash-up
https://switchzoo.com/newzoo/zoo.htm
There are lots of great tools for creating and sharing content online, here are just some of them:
Sway
We can’t wait to see your fake news imaginary animals on twitter!
ALL CREDIT FOR THE OCTOPUS CONTENT TO THE SITE’S OWNER: Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (zapatopi.net)
Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety Activities
Activity 1: consume create communicate
Activity 2: cyber resilience
Activity 3: internet safety
The Digital Wellbeing Award for Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety – Digital Schools Award
The Digital Wellbeing Award for Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety is designed to provide education professionals with the resources and support required to help pupils safely navigate the digital world.
Schools that successfully complete the programme receive a nationally recognised award by Education Scotland.
Register your school
Find out more about:
Level 4 Resources for Cyber Fundamentals and Internet Safety
Education Scotland have collaborated with Girvan Academy in South Ayrshire to produce a set of resources that combine the SQA level 4 units in Cyber Security Fundamentals and Internet Safety. These resources reinforce our belief that every learner should have the knowledge and skills to use the internet and online services safely, allowing them to spot potential risks and recover from any potential harm, they face while using online services.
The following teaching resources have been created:
- Getting Started with Chromebook
- Getting Started with iPad
- Getting Started with Online Accounts
- Getting Started with Devices teaching PowerPoint
- Getting Started with Online Accounts teaching PowerPoint
Assessment evidence
The assessor will use the portfolio approach to generate evidence that learners have achieved these units.
A learner must complete the Getting Started with Online Accounts booklet, one of the relevant ”Getting Started with Chromebook/iPad’ booklets (depending on what device they have set up), and then the assessor must complete an observation checklist for every learner:
- Assessor answer booklet
- Observation checklist
- Learner profile
The teacher answer booklet and prior verification certificate can be downloaded from the SQA secure site.
Communicate: technology-assisted harmful sexual behaviour with Stop It Now
Communicate – Email
Communicating online carries greater risk than just consuming or creating content because it involves other people and their ability to influence or affect our behaviour.
This page looks at email, which is typically the information required to create other accounts or activate devices, is still the most common form of communication in the workplace and is targeted relentlessly by criminals for financial gain.
The risks:
- phishing emails
- sharing private information (social engineering)
- sharing or receiving content that is inappropriate, offensive or harmful
- reading unreliable, or false, information
- being groomed or exploited
- being bullied
Becoming cyber resilient is the first step to being safer online. Talk to your learners about the devices and accounts that they use to access online information:
- Suggest they have at least two email accounts – one for most important accounts like bank logins and another for social media and shopping apps
- Make sure that email accounts are protected by stronger passwords and 2FA is enabled to stop others from accessing the account without permission
- Show them how to report spam, phishing and other malicious emails on the platform
- Sending phishing emails to NCSC can stop the spread of these messages and limit the harm to others – report@phishing.gov.uk
Being more cyber resilient reduces the risk of internet safety issues arising. We all want the internet to be a more welcoming space for children and young people and that is why we promote this positive message of safe, smart and kind.
With your learners:
- Are they aware of the risk of grooming – what it looks like, how it happens and how to report it?
- Ensure that learners are aware of the risks of direct messaging (DMs) – could they be offensive, harmful or bullying to someone else?
- Even though it may created and shared privately, it probably won’t stay private after you share it so, what does your content say about you?
Information:
When people’s posts are getting you down – Own It –
I want to know more about Cyberbullying – Childnet
Just a joke? – Childnet
I want to know more about Sexting – Childnet
Bullying or Harassment (reportharmfulcontent.com)
Staying-Safe-Online-advice-for-parents-and-carers.pdf (cyberscotland.com)
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