Digital Literacy Lesson Plan

Grade Level: Kindergarten


Overview: I believe that part of being digitally literate is knowing the safety risks of internet. The students that I intend to teach are Kindergarten age so the students that this lesson will be geared towards are this age group. I intend to teach how to navigate the internet safely. This is the first lesson plan in a series of digital literacy plans that I would teach my students.

Objectives:
Students will be able to navigate the internet safely.
Students will be aware of the dangers on the internet.

Opening: (10 minutes)
First start out asking students questions about general safety rules such as:
What does safety mean to you?
Do we talk to people we do not know (strangers)?
What do you think it means to be safe on the internet?
Should we talk to strangers on the internet?
Should we go on websites without asking our parents or teachers?

After we have a pre-discussion about safety, the students will watch a video called “Fauw Paw the Techno Kitty.”

Main Activity: (40 minutes)- 10 minutes for each center rotation and 10 minutes for discussion and transition time
After watching the video on internet safety we will discuss the meaning of safety on the internet. This will be more of a post discussion about what they have learned. We are then going to break off into groups.

Center 1: This group will each have a computer. These students will have 10 minutes to play a game called “Internet Panic.” It is a game that includes the character Fauw Paw and they are going to navigate the “internet” in the game so that they can help the kitty get away from dangers. The game starts out by showing the children safe places on the internet such as parental approved websites, virus protection and secure websites and then it also gives examples of the dangers such as inappropriate content, unwanted emails and online predators.

Center 2: This will be a teacher led center where the students help set up a blogging website for the class. They will each have their own blogging username and password. They will be using www.kidblog.org. This is a great website for educators to use in their classroom because it is safe and secure. We will discuss the safety issues surrounding blogging and how we are keeping ourselves safe with the privacy settings on this website. This blog will be used throughout the year for the students to express themselves with different assignments.

Center 3: This is a group where students will discuss the safety rules that we should have in the classroom. They will work on a big poster with different rules. The students will have the option to draw and write the rules on this poster. Each rotation will just add on to the rules that the previous groups came up with.

Closing: (15 minutes)
Students will come back to the carpet and we are going to talk about internet safety as a group. We are going to review the “Internet Rules” Poster and add some more rules and clarify some of the students drawing and writing. We are going to post the rules at the computer center so that every time the students use the internet they have the rules in plain sight.

Evaluation: We are now going to have the students go to their desks and draw a picture of what internet safety means to them. I am going to go to each student and ask them to tell me what it means to be safe on the internet in one sentence. We are going to hang all their pictures on a bulletin board outside the classroom so that the whole school can see what it means to be safe. The following day we are going to have blogging as one of the center activities. We are going to record their sentences on their blog on how to be safe on the internet. I am going to evaluate the students throughout the lesson and see how they are understanding safety on the internet. I am also going to record their statements and use this as an evaluation tool to determine if they understand how to be safe on the internet.

Internet Safety Resources

Fauw Paw the Techno Kitty Video: http://ikeepsafe.org/assets/videos/?vid=fauxpaw_video

Kidblog: www.kidblog.org

Internet Safety game: http://ikeepsafe.org/iksc_kids/

McGruff Safety Games: http://www.mcgruff.org/Games/
One resource I found that students can play to learn about internet safety is this website. The website has several different games including a matching game about internet safety as well as a game about cyber bullies. I believe that this website could be played after the lesson when the students are done with the main part of the lesson. This website just reinforces some of the ideas of internet safety. http://www.mcgruff.org/Games/