NYSCATE

What needs to be taught is skills, not just information, and certainly not all the inaccurate information so much “Internet safety education” has disseminated over nearly two decades.

“properties” (“persistence,” “searchability,” “replicability,” and “scalability”) and “dynamics” (“invisible audiences,” “collapsed contexts,” and “the blurring of public and private”) – and now some of those, e.g., “persistence,” are changing with the arrival of “ephemeral,” or disappearing, digital media in services

media is both social and digital.

full, healthy participation in participatory media, culture and society.

what protects children online is what protects them offline.

life skills, literacies and safeguards that are both internal – respect for self and others, resilience, empathy, and a strong inner guidance system (sometimes called a moral compass) – and external, such as good modeling, parenting and teaching by caring adults, peer mentoring, instruction in digital and media literacy, social-emotional learning, protective technology used thoughtfully, family and school rules, well-designed digital environments, and well-established laws against discrimination, sexual harassment, bullying, and crime.

teach the skills of today’s very social digital media: digital literacy, media literacy and social literacy, which together address both media-specific risk reduction and proficiency in participatory media use.

ACCESS

ANALYZE

CREATE

REFLECT

“ACT:

These are the competencies that students need to navigate participatory media and culture.

providing access and opportunities to analyze, create, reflect and act as much with digital media as with older media right in core academic classes, schools are affording them the skills, community, and self-actualization that increase safety (resilience) as well as efficacy in and out of media. This is the real “Internet safety [or competency]” that needs to be taught in schools.

Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.

When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency

interleaving