July 24
The US government provides an online resource where teachers and students can get help with cyber citizenship.
Welcome to sos.fbi.gov — FBI Safe Online Surfing (SOS)
This is a mission statement on the website:
"The goal of FBI-SOS is to promote cyber citizenship and help students learn about online safety while engaging in fun, interactive games. The program was designed to address current Internet safety threats while keeping each grade level's online usage and knowledge in mind. We hope that you find the program beneficial and that your students use the information to make themselves safer digital citizens."
This website is very intuitive to use. You simply select a a grade from 3-8 and the game is ready to go. You do not need instructions to play as it's clear from the outset what to do. You do not need to maneuver complicated moves as the main goal of the game is to raise students' awareness of cyber citizenship. You simply choose an answer to a pop-up question related to safety, rights and responsibilities as cyber citizen. The questions are appropriate in terms of reading and conceptual difficulty for the intended age group. However, in my opinion, based on my experience with playing games for different grades, the questions for the lower and upper grades are similar in terms of scope of knowledge and comprehension skills involved. I did not see an evident increase of challenge in the games when the upper grade level is used. However I find the questions interesting, covering a broad area of digital citizenship, addressing both technical and ethical issues, and have a balanced level of vocabulary and syntactic complexity.
When I started out my exploration of this site for grade three, I was pleasantly impressed with the ease of use and the presentation of the game. It looks fun and colorful, but not overloaded with instructions or distractive details in the design, so that the user maintains focus on learning about cyber safety and responsibilities through interacting with the questions. I had a chance to explore these questions, and I was surprised how much I had to learn and upgrade my knowledge in this area. In fact I failed to correctly answer the first two questions that came up. The first question was if there was internet on phone, game console and other devices. I did not know these devices could be connected to internet. The website told me that all of these and more can be connected to internet, even a refrigerator! Another question was whether by talking to a device, you used the internet. Again the answer is yes, and I had to read the explanation to see why. I was losing my confidence at this point, but fortunately I thought more carefully about the answers, and did not make more mistakes.
I explored this web tool late at night. I was tired at first but I got more energetic as I played the games. It is testimony to the fun aspect of the game, which is an important consideration for engaging the students in learning and ultimately being a successful learning tool.
The website includes information about the national competition that takes place monthly from September to May. It states that "The 10 highest scores in each category are shown on the leaderboard each month. When possible, winning schools in each category will receive a visit from a local FBI special agent. Good luck!" This unique incentive can encourage students and teachers to use the learning tool to grow in knowledge and skills related to cyber citizenship.
This website provides additional online resources for educators to help children with cyberbullying, online safety and other issues. Because this is an official site of the U.S. government, the users should trust these resources as reliable sources.
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