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Mr Bass Online

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Category Archives: Online Safety

Creating a Digital Footprint

Posted on by Posted in 21st Century Education, Education, English, Friday Flyer, Google Tools, leadership, Literacy, Making Connections, Online Safety, Technology, web literacy Leave a comment

Have you ever Googled yourself? You know, just to see what would come up? If you haven’t, I’d encourage you to do so. Put your name in Google, put quotes around it (so it only searches for your name) and see what you get. Chances are you may find a few links to people with your similar name. For me, I often find information about William M. Bass III, an american forensic anthropologist best known for his work with “The Body Farm“. But, if I look down a little further, I will find my website and other references to me online. This represents a portion of my digital footprint, the digital information that can be found out about me by a simple Google search.

Let’s face it, more and more things are online these days and there are more ways to share information than there ever have been. It’s important to know what kind of information there is about you because, truly, you need to manage your own digital footprint. Just as you manage your credit, identity, and reputation, your digital footprint is a representation of you but online.

More than likely, if you seek information now, where do you go? It’s probably the internet. Looking to see if a business is reputable? Try looking for reviews online. The same can be said for you as an educator. I ask my grad students every semester if they looked me up before class started. The majority of them have. What about you? Do you think your students do a search for you before school starts each year? They just might.

My point is that you want to control your own digital message. What do you want your students to find out about you? If you Google yourself and don’t find much, is that a good or a bad thing? Will Richardson, an educator, author, and champion of teachers says in his presentations, “Repeat after me… I want strangers to be able to find me online.” Meaning that in our world, identity matters and digital identity is equally important. You want to be Googled well. You. Your students. Your family. Trust me, you have a digital identity. What does it say about you? Are you Googled well?

If you’d like to learn more about managing your own digital identity, let me know. Also, check out Common Sense Media. They have great resources for educators and parents for lessons to help kids to start thinking about what it means to be online and to start creating their own identity online. Colleges and employers are looking. Control what they find.

The following video is one that I often play when I talk about ones digital footprint. Enjoy.

What does it mean to be “literate”?

Posted on by Posted in 21st Century Education, Education, English, Friday Flyer, Literacy, NCTE, Online Safety, web literacy 2 Comments

Over the last week, two things have come across my desk that have me thinking a lot about literacy. The most recent was a post on the 21st Century Fluency Project blog that referenced a Wired article entitled “First Twitter Fiction Festival Might Mutate Storytelling Forever“. Interested, I followed the links to the Twitter blog where they announced the event. What they are proposing seems to be a great experiment in what is possible with Twitter as a broadcast medium. In the past I had heard about people attempting to write novels on Twitter and collaborate with people around the world as they create a story where anyone can contribute. Interesting.

The other item that got me thinking was a presentation that was shared by a Google employee named Dan Russell entitled “What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?“. While I didn’t actually hear his talk, I did browse through the PDF of his presentation and found the slides and ideas presented in them fascinating. In his abstract for the talk he states:

Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being literate as well.

So, what as Dan asks, what does it mean to be “literate” in our world? Has the notion of literacy changed? In my mind, it absolutely has. Reading and writing are no longer the only measures of literacy in our world. Web literacy, media literacy, and every other type of literacy that is out there will be important aspects of students lives to come. Over time these too will change. So the question is not only, what does it mean to be literate? The question now is, what do we need to do to help prepare our students to be literate in our current reality? I readily admit that I don’t entirely know the answer but I do think that it’s more than we’re doing now. I’m not suggesting that everything we’re doing is wrong, but focusing on an outdated model for literacy education is not going to help students become literate members of our community in the modern era.

Has the notion of literacy changed in your classroom? How about in your own life? Do you still define literacy as you did when you were in school? What has changed for you?

Information Literacy in the Digital Age

Posted on by Posted in 21st Century Education, Education, leadership, Literacy, Making Connections, Online Safety, web literacy Leave a comment

Earlier this week my 8 year old daughter and I were sitting at our kitchen table engaged in a highly competitive game of Princess Yahtzee when an campaign ad for the congressional elections came on the TV during the news. Typically commercials are something to be fast forwarded through in our household, but alas, with live TV you can’t skip over those things you don’t want to watch (yet). “Well that was rude,” she commented indignantly on the advertisement. “Why were they so mean?” she asked. While I considered getting into the whole idea of mudslinging and spin, I instead told her that during elections, people aren’t always nice to each other because they are trying to win votes and that everyone has their own viewpoint in different topics but that doesn’t make them wrong, it’s just an opinion. That seemed to appease her for the moment and we went back to the game. However, I know that this is now something that she’s thinking about and she’s wondering about the differnet viewpoints that people have. I know this won’t be our last conversation around this topic, especially as we continue to ramp up for the presidential election. The question is, where will we go next?

In an era where everyone has the ability to publish online, this conversation will get more and more complicated making the need to teach and work with kids of all ages on the ability to recognize bias in all forms of media (not just text based). It will stretch us to think more critically about media literacy and the messages that bombard us daily. How can we know whether that statistic we found is accurrate or if we have just become the victims of spin and convenience? This question will become increasingly more difficult (and important) to address in classrooms regardless of content area. I’m not suggesting that there has to be a dedicated unit in your curriculum to make an impact. What I am suggesting is that it’s important to model your thought process as you work with students and information. How do you determine what is credible information and what isn’t? How do you know that the website you are going to is to be trusted? These are things that we may do naturally as educators and users of information, but we may not draw attention to the process with students. Show them your thinking and reasoning about how you identify bias and evaluate information in your own work so that they can see good examples outside of their own experiences.

As for me and my daughter, I too will try to be more intentional about explaining why she shouldn’t click on the very first result after searching for something. We will have conversations around advertising and the messages that come across in all forms of media and I will do my best to help her filter the plethora of information that she receives so that she will learn how to do it for herself. In the meantime, I’m glad that, even in the midst of a heated Yahtzee game, not all messages will be positive and that she must figure out what works for her.

Here are a few resources for thinking about media and information literacy: