Online and Office Safety

For some reason, all business/technology ed classes have the safety standards. It’s virtually impossible to come up with a different safety lesson for each class I teach since the standards are exactly the same. Here they are:

A. SAFETY AND ETHICS

1. Identify major causes of work-related accidents in offices.
2. Describe the threats to a computer network, methods of avoiding attacks, and options in dealing with virus attacks.
3. Identify potential abuse and unethical uses of computers and networks.
4. Explain the consequences of illegal, social, and unethical uses of information technologies (e.g., piracy; illegal downloading; licensing infringement; inappropriate uses of software, hardware, and mobile devices).
5. Differentiate between freeware, shareware, and public domain software copyrights.
6. Discuss computer crimes, terms of use, and legal issues such as copyright laws, fair use laws, and ethics pertaining to scanned and downloaded clip art images, photographs, documents, video, recorded sounds and music, trademarks, and other elements for use in Web publications.
7. Identify netiquette including the use of e-mail, social networking, blogs, texting, and chatting.
8. Describe ethical and legal practices in business professions such as safeguarding the confidentiality of business-related information.

Some of the standards especially the office safety ones seem irrelevant to computer classes. They are there because my subject area falls under Career/Work.

I begin the school year with Safety because it’s the one area that isn’t hands on for students. Once they get used to working on the computers it’s hard to go to notes. It’s also good to start with safety because the class rosters seem to change constantly the first week of school. I had 12 new students since last Friday. With Safety it’s easy to catch them up without them feeling like they missed a lot of work.

I found Surfing Among the Cyber Sharks PPT PowerPoint on www.cyberpatrol.com. I modified it greatly for my classes. Since I teach high school, I want the focus to be on discussion not on notes. I shortened this PowerPoint and broke it down. I also converted it inot flipcharts for ActivInspire. My content does come from Cyber Patrol. The great thing about the content is that it’s most relevant to students because it focuses on social networking sites. It talks about Cyber Sharks–which are broken down 3 types: Attractors, Attackers and Enablers.

Even though my Flipchart was 26 pages long it was broken down in the span of 4-5 days. On Day 1, the students watched a video that I got from Discovery Education. They had to do a video review as they watched it. They turned it in using Edmodo.

Day 2 was mostly notes. Day 3 was focused on “Enablers” which is about Chat Rooms and Sexual Predators. I showed my classes the first 4 minutes of this To Catch A Predator video. The rest of the video was wayyy to graphic and inappropriate.

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We also played the interactive game I made on ActivInspire. I used the Magic Hat to make it and we reviewed the 3 types of cyber sharks. I wish older students enjoyed these types of activities more. I had to practical beg students to come up to the board. We also finished the notes. The last of the notes were not from cyber patrol. It was on sexting and consequences.

Day 5 was Office Safety. I felt that at this point I had talked enough and they were ready to not take notes. Another teacher sent me this link http://www.labtrain.noaa.gov/osha600/mod27/2701—-.htm. I made an outline that students filled out as they read through that website. I went over the answers with them once they completed the handout.

Day 6: Safety Test–covered Notes, Video Review, Office Safety Outline and sprinkled with a few questions about my classroom procedures.

Originally I had planned on having the students do some sort of activity like making safety posters but I didn’t have time for that and it was unnecessary. However, my Multimedia Class was assigned “PowerPoint Story” with the topic being any of the safety topics we covered in class. They are suppose to take a real life news article, make it an interesting story and put it into PowerPoint form that loops. I have an example that I made on Photo Peach that I show them. I make them do theirs in PowerPoint because they haven’t learned Photo Peach and this makes a good PowerPoint review.

It took me over a week to cover just Online Safety and Office Safety. This does not cover all the safety standards. I did not cover ethical issues, viruses, copyright, etc. Throughout the year I will do activities and article reviews to cover these standards. I didn’t want to overload them with all this information.

I am selling this lesson in it’s entirety on Teachers Pay Teachers. It will include my video review, outline, PowerPoint Story (with my example), Test and answer keys to everything. Once the Multimedia students finish their PowerPoints I can add those as well. If you purchase this lesson I will include my flipchart with the video plus a bonus on Copyright (that I haven’t taught yet) at no additional cost.

First Week!!

School started back for students yesterday.  Teachers spent the majority of the work days in meetings. Now that I’m not a new teacher or even a kinda new teacher, I don’t mind the meetings as much.  I only had to make few minor adjustments to the syllabi, parent letter and website.  I also updated the appearance of my classroom!

The first 2-3 days, my roster changes so much that I really don’t like to get into too much content.  My main focus has been housekeeping kind of things.   On the first day,  as students come into my room I have a PowerPoint looping that has general info.  Unfortunately, hardly anyone read my PowerPoint and therefore didn’t follow directions :(.  Last year, I put out a sheet of paper in the back of the classroom for students to sign if they could not login to the computers.  That was one of the best things I did.  It saves time and I can rectify the issue before they actually need the computers.  I did that again this year and today all those who couldn’t login yesterday were able to.

In all my classes we are doing the same lesson plan for the 1st week.  The 1st standards are the same, which is Safety.  This makes it pretty easy on me in terms of lesson planning.

I started putting my Syllabus in a PowerPoint after seeing another teacher do that.  I don’t give out hard copies of it because it’s posted on my teacher website.  I give a quiz on safety next week in which I add questions from the syllabus (mostly about class expectations and procedures). That way the students don’t zone me out.  Most of my classes were interrupted with class meetings so I wasn’t able to get through it all yesterday.  We did an ice breaker and then depending on how much time we had left some watched  this video yesterday others today.

 

Today, I finished the syllabus and showed them my website.  They were shown how to get to the syllabus, standards and acceptable use policy.  Over the summer, I learned about Edmodo.  I liked it so much that I have decided to use it instead of the teacher website that I had been using.    I set it up during the workdays and made my student info sheet a form using google docs.  Then added it to Edmodo.  Today the students signed up for Edmodo and filled out the student info sheet.  I don’t know too much about Edmodo yet, but I think it’s worth checking out! I’ll be testing it out all year.   Google docs is awesome!  I have all my students’ info in 1 place as a spreadsheet.

The only hard copies my students received were the parent letters and bathroom passes (both of which were half sheets).  I also put the students in assigned seats only to see that I have new students tomorrow! I probably could’ve waited a day.  Two of my classes were able to start on the Online Safety lesson.  Tomorrow, we’ll continue it and watch an Internet Safety Video from United Streaming.I also posted a video review on Edmodo.  It’s my first assignment on there–so exciting!

I’m pretty happy with my classes, students and first week so far!  I hope I’m not jinxing myself.