Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Part A: My digital footprint

20 minutes

Part B: Where do we spend our time?

25 minutes

Part C: Cleaning up

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions:

Students will:

recognise that their ‘digital footprint’ can be permanent
learn how to be smart digital citizens by curating their online presence
know how to collect, interpret and compare data.

Success criteria:

Students can:

collect and interpret data
read and interpret information
navigate websites and apps to increase safety and privacy measures.

Part A: My digital footprint

Safety first: Remind students of the Handling Sensitive Topics and Issues Factsheet. Review this document together and take time to clarify anything.

Step 1

Play this video:

What's in Your Digital Footprint? - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P_gj3oRn8s)

Step 2

Ask students to pause for a few moments and close their eyes. Think about the things they know they’ve shared online. Next, ask them to imagine someone is typing their name into a search engine. Ask: "How much of what you’ve shared would you want them to find?"

Step 3

Write or draw a response to the question ‘if someone searched for me online, they’d probably find…’ on the Student Worksheet.

Note: Some students might not like to write everything down as they may feel embarrassed or worry about getting in trouble, for example, if they have shared explicit pictures of themselves. Acknowledge that students might prefer not to write everything, but encourage them to think about why they don't feel comfortable doing so and who might be a trusted adult that they could talk to about this.

Step 4

Instruct students to highlight or underline the things they’ve added to their worksheet, using the key provided. If you have completed the earlier lessons in this unit sequence, you can prompt them to think about the risks of catfishing, grooming and manipulation, or consent, when completing this task.

Part B: Where do we spend our time?

Step 1

Ask students to use the frequency (tally) table on the Student Worksheet to survey classmates on what apps, games or social media sites they have accounts with and where the information they’ve identified in the previous activity stage would be stored. They may want to look back at their ‘my digital day’ list from Know The Internet as a prompt. Before beginning the survey and collecting data, review how to use tally marks.

Note: If you have any transgender or gender-diverse students in your class, consider carefully how to approach this task (e.g. how to record the data), or whether you need to separate the data via gender at all.

Step 2

After completing the tally, ask students to find the four most common apps or sites for both male and female students. Use your knowledge of your students to decide if you need to first model how to do this. Explain that it is interesting to break this up by gender, as tricky people will also know this and target the sites that either boys or girls are using (if you decide to do so).

Step 3

Share the eSafety infographic which shows that 7/10 teenagers use YouTube, 6/10 use Instagram, 5/10 use Facebook and 4/10 use TikTok. Compare this to your class’s data. If it is significantly different, ask students to speculate why? For example, the data was from older students, or your class members prefer playing games to using social media.

Part C: Cleaning up

Step 1

Explain to students that they are going to use the top four sites that the class uses to create a ‘how to’ guide for cleaning up their digital footprint on that site. Review why this is important by thinking about the video shown in Part A, along with the discussions and video resources shared in previous lessons in this sequence, such as The Strange Story of the Singing Clownfish and the risks of online grooming.

Step 2

Divide your class into groups, allocating one of the top apps they have identified to each group.

If there are too many students to allow productive small group work, you may wish to choose more apps.

Provide students with a device and direct them to the App Factsheets developed by the Carly Ryan Foundation. Alternatively, you can provide printed copies. Allow students to seek out the factsheets for their app.

Step 3

Tell students they are going to read their factsheet to find the helpful information included on their Student Worksheet. Before commencing, they need to allocate group roles to ensure they are working efficiently. The Timekeeper will keep track of the time allocated to the task. The Note taker will write down the responses after the group has agreed on them. The Task Monitor will ensure that the group remains on track and everyone participates, and the Reporter will explain to you how the group is working together when you check in with them.

Step 4

Allow students to work in their groups to complete the task on the Student Worksheet.

Reflection

As a class, create a list of places and people whom they could share this information with. For example, they could ask for it to go into the school newsletter or share it with a local youth centre. You can then take further steps to arrange this for your students.

Take it home

At home, students and parents/caregivers can review the App Factsheets from The Carly Ryan Foundation. They can then work together to ensure that each account they use is secure and they are happy with their digital footprint. They might also like to conduct an internet search of the child's name to see what is publicly visible to help them decide what work needs to be done to clean up. In a week or two, they can conduct another internet search to check that information has been removed as expected.

Note: Web crawlers and search engines take a bit of time to find changes. You will notice that you can still find newly hidden or deleted information for a few days or weeks after the changes, but keep checking as it will disappear in a bit of time.

Differentiated learning

Extension

Ask students to calculate the percentage of the class that uses each site or app.
Use a screen recording tool to create a ‘how to’ video for each app.

Provisions for Learning Support

Some students or parents/caregivers may need one-on-one support to navigate through the privacy settings on various apps. Try to have some additional adults present to help out, or provide an evening session for families to attend with the school's librarian and/or IT team. Consider whether you will need interpreters.

eSafety For Kids - Cleaning Up

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Summary

Learning intentions:

Students will:

Success criteria:

Students can:

Lesson Guides and Printables

Lesson Details

Skills

Curriculum Mapping

Resources Required

Additional Info

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