Taste of Tech

For the last 20 years, I’ve had this love-hate relationship with computer programming. I took a high school programming course at the suggestion of a math teacher, and found that I enjoyed it and was relatively good at it. I liked the idea of controlling the machine — deciding what I want it to do, and giving it the commands to do it. I was the puppeteer. I was pulling the strings.

This led to taking a structured programming class as an elective my first year in college, which led to my adding “computer science education” as a major.

Unfortunately, at that time, nobody really had any idea what a computer science education major should know, so they basically just told me to get a minor in systems analysis. I took data structures. That was kind of fun. I learned about stacks and queues and linked lists and trees and all sorts of things I don’t understand anymore. I learned Cobol (why?) and Fortran (why?) before finding out that I had inadvertently skipped the first class and had to go back and learn BASIC. Then it was on to IBM mainframe assembly language.

None of this had any real relevance in the world of education. No schools had IBM mainframes. I might get to teach a little BASIC and Pascal. If I was really fortunate, I could teach C (which, oddly, was about the only language that wasn’t required). The college of education predicted that we were going to leave the university and get jobs teaching high school computer science, where we’d be using the only computers schools had available — the Apple IIe. So in our methods courses, we learned 6502 Assembler, how to build analog-to-digital converts to interface with the Apple II, and how to program in LOGO. (The programming part of LOGO, not just the turtle graphics stuff).

By the end of all this, I had had enough of programming. I got a job teaching middle school computer applications. I was teaching students to use productivity applications. The closest I got to programming was writing spreadsheet formulas. Two years later I switched jobs, and inherited another middle school course that had previously been a programming class. “Irrelevant,” I declared. “The kids don’t need to know this stuff.” I taught productivity tools, some Internet basics, and the concept of hypermedia. The closest I got to programming was teaching them HTML from scratch. Now that I look back on it, I’m amazed at what those kids could do, simply because they didn’t know it was supposed to be hard.

I eventually did get a job teaching high school programming. I taught Visual Basic for two years. I always felt it was an awkward language, and that it doesn’t serve the students very well. I’ve been disappointed twice that they’ve kept the same language in place when revising the courses of study. While I can’t say I didn’t like teaching programming, I also wasn’t too sad when my duties shifted into other directions.

I’ve always advocated for teaching kids to use technology to be productive in non-technical ways. Use email and the Internet as communication tools. Use word processors to make your writing better, to simplify editing, and to make professional-looking documents. Use spreadsheets to organize data, answer “what-if” questions, and draw conclusions based on the numbers. Use presentation tools to augment the message you’re delivering in the presentation. There have been many variations on this theme, but I’ve never strongly advocated for learning about the machine for its own sake. So I’ve never really pushed programming.

Apparently, I’m not alone. According to Carnegie Mellon University, the number of computer science majors declined by more than 60% between 2000 and 20004. In the same time period, the number of females majoring in computer science declined by 80%. Some point to the lack of emphasis on the more technical side of computing as a major contributor to this decline. People like me are de-emphasizing how computers work in favor of an emphasis on how we work with computers.

Two recent projects are aiming to change this. Scratch is a programming environment designed for 8- to 16-year-old students by the MIT Media Lab. In it, kids combine graphics, pictures, video, and audio in new, innovative ways. At the same time, they can snap programming blocks together to control how the elements are displayed, or how the computer user can interact with them. Windows and Mac versions of the free program are available on the project web site. There are also lots of teacher resources and an envrionment for students to share their creations.

For older students, Carnegie Mellon has developed the Alice environment. It can be used to create 3-D animated worlds, with characters that move around and interact. It’s a great way to tell a story, create an interactive game, or make a video to share online. It’s targeted especially toward the middle school and high school crowd, with an emphasis on attracting girls. Like Scratch, it’s easy to use, allowing you to drag and drop the various elements to determine how they interact on the screen.

The thing that’s striking about both of these tools is that they’re teaching programming while doing other things. They’re teaching kids to be good problem solvers, innovative thinkers, and collaborators. That’s meeting half of the 21st Century Skills. If they happen to learn a little programming while they’re at it, and maybe decide that they like telling machines what to do, so much the better.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking a closer look at both of these tools.

This week, we’re offering two professional development classes on using technology in the classroom. In the first class, we’re covering a series of interactive web tools including Protopage, Blogging, Podcasting, Wikis, and Moodle.

Because he introduces this better than anyone else in our district, we convinced middle school teacher Joe Zenir to introduce this for us. Here’s the video of his presentation:

“The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.”

– Elbert Hubbard

In the first part of this series, we tried to cut through some of the irrational fears about online safety and put the issue into perspective. In part 2, we looked at some tips for parents to help keep their kids safe online. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to teaching children to protect themselves.

As children grow, they become more independent, gain more freedom, and take on more responsibility. When my daughter was a preschooler, she decided she was going to visit her friend. The friend lived six houses away, on the same side of the street. She knew that if she just followed the sidewalk, she’d get there, so off she went. Mom, of course, wasn’t very happy about this when she found her daughter halfway down the street. Now, she’s bigger. She can go to her friend’s house by herself (when she’s not grounded). She can go to the park that’s a few backyards away. She can’t yet go to the high school that’s slightly farther away. As they grow, the kids gain new freedom. The boundaries and limits change. But they also have to take the responsibility for their behavior along with it.

In my house, we recently instituted a change in how the TV is managed. Previously, we had several different profiles on the satellite receiver. The default one, which the kids used, only had access to about half a dozen channels, and there were pretty serious rating limits. Now there are more channels available, and the kids have access to DVR’d programs. But they’re much better about self-regulating, choosing appropriate programs, and limiting the amount of time they spend in front of the TV. It also helps that Mom and Dad set expectations for TV use, with rewards and consequences based on the choices they make.

The Internet isn’t much different. There are some things on the Internet that aren’t for kids. There are also some things kids shouldn’t share online. They shouldn’t tell people where they live. They shouldn’t give their passwords out to their friends. As they get older, they have to be concerned with pictures and video they upload. They also have to protect their online reputations, since most of this stuff is public. And, they have to know when to allow things to be public and when to protect it.

How do we teach this? Here are some pretty good resources:

NetSmartzKids has a number of games, videos, activities, and other resources for elementary kids. They address everything from password privacy and stranger danger to computer viruses in a compelling, kid-friendly way. For older students, NetSmartz Teens takes the privacy lessons a step further, and also addresses cyberbullying and online enticement.

Think U Know has resources for students aged 5-7, 8-10, and 11-16. The resources for younger kids include the Hector’s World cartoon series on online safety. In addition to teaching kids how to be careful online, they also address the etiquette issues of being nice to one another. For older children, the Cyber Cafe is a place to have fun while learning about online safety. The resources for teens also address mobile phone use, chatting, social networking, and blogging.

Social Safety offers a free packet on online safety for teens. It’s definitely written from the fear perspective, with the assumptions that Law & Order episodes mirror real life, and that people who contact you online are probably just trying to kidnap, rape or kill you. But in the right context, it might be a useful resource.

Safekids and Safeteens are web sites that have good resources for children and teens for staying safe online. While it’s mostly textual information, does give useful information from an authoritative source.

X-Block is another resource for older students. It’s a much more interactive resource, giving students a way to participate in social networking on a limited basis while learning the basics of online safety.

Regardless of the method used, we have to teach our children to protect themselves online. We can’t always be looking over their shoulders to protect them. We have to set expectations of responsible behavior, teach them what those behaviors are, trust them to make good decisions, and then follow up with positive and negative consequences based on their choices.

In the first part of this series, we examined the issue of cybersafety. Hopefully, we dispelled some myths and put the issue into perspective. While it’s important to protect our kids online, and it’s important to teach them to protect themselves, it is not at all likely that our children will become the victims of cybercrime, even if they haven’t been schooled on the best practices to avoid online predators. Now, we’ll start getting into the more useful stuff. This is the condensed overview — the sound byte version of how to keep kids safe online. The biggest thing to remember is that we’re balancing a lot of factors here. Consider this analogy, which comes from the Byron Review:

This is no different to how we think about managing risk for children in the offline world, where decreasing supervision and monitoring occurs with age as we judge our children to be increasing in their competence to identify and manage risks. So, when we teach our children to cross the road safely we do it in stages:

• We hold their hand when they cross the road.
• We teach them to think, look both ways and then cross.
• When we see that they are starting to understand this we let them cross walking beside us, without holding on to them.
• Eventually we let them do it alone, maybe watching from a distance at first, but then unsupervised.
• And throughout this, the environment supports them with signs and expected behaviour from others in the community – the green man, zebra crossings, speed limits and other responsible adults.

Depending on the age and experience of the child, then, you have to take measures to both protect and teach. As they become more experienced online, we also have to loosen the reins a little. Then, there are inevitably the elements of trust and privacy that will come into play as children move through adolescence. There aren’t any hard and fast rules for when changes need to take place. It all depends on the children, the parents, and the relationships between them. That being said, here are some boiler-plate suggestions for getting started:

Put the computer in a public place: If the computer is in the kitchen (as ours is) or in the family room, or in some other public part of the house, children are much less likely to do things online they know they’re not supposed to do. You don’t have to constantly look over their shoulders — you can see what they’re doing from across the room or just by walking by. It allows you to monitor what’s going on without giving the impression that you’re spying.

Give them a place to start: Set your computer’s home page to a kid-friendly starting place. Use a tool like Protopage to provide links to sites they use frequently. Embed some kid-friendly search tools. If they’re always starting with a Google search box, they could end up anywhere.

Set time limits: Just as children shouldn’t be spending hours on end in front of the TV, they shouldn’t be spending hours and hours online. Set reasonable limits based on the age of the children, other activities and responsibilities they have, and the needs of others in the family to have access to the technology.

Discuss “private” versus “public”: Children need to understand that there are some things we can share with people online, and there are other things we should keep private. Many children are confused by the online concept of “friend.” Online friends in social networks can’t necessarily be trusted as much as you’d trust a friend from school.

Monitor one-on-one communication: If your child has an email account, configure it to send copies of all of the messages to you. If you can set limits on who they can send and receive email from, do it. My first and third graders both have their own email accounts, but they can only email their parents and grandparents, and Mom and Dad get copies of all of their messages.

Learn about the technology: You can’t keep up with all of the buzzwords and technologies. You probably have some idea about Myspace and Facebook. Do you know what Twitter is? How about ooVoo? Pownce? Parents of younger kids probably have a good idea about what Webkinz is. But do you know about Bella Sara? If you’re looking for a great place to get an overview of a lot of new web tools, check out the Common Craft videos. Google has partnered with Common Sense Media to help parents and educators teach children to be safe online. This video gives a good overview of many of the issues, and provides some common-sense tips for parents and teachers:

In the next part of the series, we’ll look at some online resources to help kids learn to be safe online.

I’ve received a couple questions lately about keeping kids safe online. We see news reports all the time about the danger of social networking sites, and the problems with posting personal information online, and the number of children who have been exposed to inappropriate material online. Today, I’m starting a series of blog posts about cybersafety to take a fairly comprehensive view of the issue and what we can do about it.

Today, we’re starting with a look at the problem itself. Maybe you’ve heard about the softball player who was stalked by someone she met online. She thought he was a 14-year-old boy halfway across the country instead of a 40-year-old man in her town (the story is fiction, by the way). We’ve seen plenty of news items about how dangerous the Internet is for kids. Most of them cite statistics that claim that one out of every seven teens with Internet access has been sexually solicited online. We hear stories about children and teens getting tricked into meeting online predators. Theoretically, all of those things can happen. But the problem may not be as serious as many would have you believe.

Take, for example, the one-in-seven statistic. That comes from Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, a report from from the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Here’s what the report actually says:

…approximately 1 in 7 youth Internet users (13%) received unwanted sexual solicitations or approaches in the past year. Close to half of the solicitations were relatively mild events that did not appear to be dangerous or frightening. Four (4) percent of all youth Internet users, however, received aggressive sexual solicitations, which threatened to spill over into “real life” because the solicitor asked to meet the youth in person; called them on the telephone; or sent them offline mail, money, or gifts. Also 4% of youth Internet users had distressing sexual solicitations that left them feeling very or extremely upset or afraid. Two (2) percent of youth had solicitations that were both aggressive and distressing.

So while the implication is that 13% of our teens are being stalked by predators, the reality is that only 4% of teens are upset or afraid, and only half of them were in situations where the person tried to initiate offline contact. While one in fifty is still a serious problem, it’s not on the same scale as one in seven. A panel discussion of these findings took place recently among experts meeting in Washington, D.C. Video and transcripts of this discussion are online.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project studied teens and online stranger contact in 2007. They found that nearly a third of online teens have been contacted online by someone with no connection to them or their friends. That’s not too surprising. I meet new people online all the time. It’s not necessarily any more dangerous than striking up a conversation with someone in line at the store, or the people in adjacent seats at a concert or sporting event. Considering the facts that they count social networking friend requests and spam email messages in this count, I’m surprised that the number isn’t higher. A more important number is the percent of teens who have been contacted by a stranger online who made them feel frightened or uncomfortable. The Pew study reports a figure of 7%. Again, it’s not an insignificant number, but it’s not a third of online teens.

Interestingly, the biggest predictors of stranger contact are social network profiles and posting photos online. Teens who have publicly-viewable profiles on social networking sites, or who have posted photographs of themselves online are twice as likely to be contacted by people they don’t know.

Writing in the New York Times, David Pogue points to some of the findings reported in a recent PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online. Pogue points to several quotes from producer Rachel Dretzin, including these:

The data shows that giving out personal information over the Internet makes absolutely no difference when it comes to a child’s vulnerability to predation.

The vast majority of kids who do end up having contact with a stranger they meet over the Internet are seeking out that contact.

All the kids we met, without exception, told us the same thing: They would never dream of meeting someone in person they’d met online.

These statements directly contradict most of the cyber-safety information that’s intended to help protect kids. The first item, certainly, contradicts the Pew report I just mentioned.

The Byron Review released its report on cybersafety in March, 2007 (an executive summary and a guide for students are also available). The report focuses on video games, media content, and Internet use among children and teens. I like the analogy to swimming. The odds that you are going to die by drowning are approximately 1 in 1100. Yet we still have swimming pools and water parks. We still go to the beach. Some people even have dangerous bathing tubs in their own homes. We put up fences around the pools. We post signs warning about the dangers of drowning. We post lifeguards in busy swimming areas. We have shallow ends. We do everything we can to protect people from the danger. But at the same time, we also teach people how to swim, so they can protect themselves.

Conclusions? Children need to be protected online. Certainly. Especially at younger ages. As they get older, they need to learn how to protect themselves. This is really important, and cyber-safety is something we should be addressing with every student. But it’s not more important than teaching kids how to cross the street or ride a bike. The Internet is not more dangerous than firearms or alcohol or cars, all of which kill a significant number of teens each year. The problem calls for a balanced, reasoned approach. And we’ll start there with part 2.