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Metropolitan Soundview High School had no art program when Cheriece White took a job there 10 years ago.

So she created her own.

The art and technology teacher initially designed a curriculum around digital storytelling and then transformed it into a multimedia art curriculum that included iMovie, storyboarding, illustration, children’s books, and front-end web design. The students gravitated to the web design part, wanting to know more about designing websites for their own business ideas. That prompted White to shift again, developing a curriculum on social media design and content creation.

“With how social media, graphic design, and technology are growing into every aspect of normal living, it is super important to have students practice these skills for their own benefit,” she said. “They are going to engage in social media and technology anyway, so why not teach them how to make money from it through design?”

White not only sees visual arts and graphic art as “great emotional outlets for kids this age to express themselves in a healthier and positive way.” She also wants her art course to provide a “tangible” way for them to become young entrepreneurs.

She wants her students to be college- and career-ready, as well as “small business ready.”

She’s hopeful that it’s working. Former students have gone on to create a cupcake company, a dog-walking business, a baseball clinic, and an Etsy digital download business. A group of current students who already have their own clothing brand recently told her how their social media following increased significantly after applying some techniques they learned in class.

After decades of working with educational technology, I’ve come to the realization that technology will have its greatest impact in the classroom when educators allow learners to use digital technology as a self-directed learning tool. This means not just providing students with laptops and online resources, but ensuring they have the necessary skills to find, validate, apply, and curate the vast amount of information now available to them.

More importantly, they must be given control of when and how these digital tools are used. Think about how adults use their smartphones; they use them whenever they need to. No one is dictating when they can use it, how they can use it, or where they can use it–why don’t we allow learners to do the same?

Imagine a classroom where students have unfettered access to digital tools and resources whenever needed. That would be a very different classroom than the ones I’ve experienced, but one that would be able to support the digital learners in our classrooms today.

This realization is based on years of implementing various educational technology initiatives, and the recognition of the similarity between the impact mechanical technology had on the Industrial Age and how digital technology has impacted the Information Age. When mechanized technology was introduced, it was primarily used to replace repetitive and rote physical tasks. It took a while for people to be comfortable with mechanized automation, but once they were, it created growth and advances in manufacturing that were previously unattainable.

Similarly, today’s digital tools can be used to replace repetitive and rote mental tasks. In other words, digital technology has automated memorization.  In a typical classroom, students learn content through processes that rely heavily on a variety of rote and repetitive activities. These activities not only help students learn the content, but also allow them to develop memorization skills.

In recent days, Ukrainian officials have expressed urgent concern that “Russia is planning to launch massive cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.” Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a dizzying series of cybersecurity threats and incidences that have plagued the global community for what seems like forever. Every day our country is fighting a seemingly invisible war against cybercriminals, and our students—the most vulnerable among us—are suffering the most.

According to the FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report, more than 14,000 victims of cybercrime that year were under the age of 20, with losses totaling $100 million. Of these victims, about six children per day faced online exploitation or abuse. And these are only the crimes that have been reported to the FBI—about 80% of cybercrime goes unreported every year.

That’s why it’s becoming increasingly more urgent for us to protect our students from the constant threats they face online. Teaching them how to navigate these threats must include four vital strategies:

Think Before You Click

Most of us teach our little kids not to talk to strangers. But many of us fail to adequately extend this lesson to the cyberworld, which is especially concerning considering that phishing attacks were the top reported cybercrime in 2021, making up 41% of all reports.

Urge your kids to be cyber-vigilant and to avoid clicking links from people or organizations they don’t recognize or downloading unsolicited attachments from people they don’t know or trust. And if something suspicious appears to come from someone they do trust—always double-check the sender’s email address or username for misspellings. It’s also important to scan the message for suspicious language to determine if it was written by someone else, and hover your mouse over any hyperlinks (no clicking!) to preview the destination address and ensure it’s a trusted website.

Be Wary of Oversharing

Students must be reminded to keep some things private. Period. Detailing every single moment of their lives—for example, when they’re away on vacation, what their daily schedule is like, or tagging their location while they’re still there—can give invisible strangers a prime opportunity to attack, potentially putting your student in a physically dangerous situation.

Related:
5 safeguarding tips for schools this year
5 tools every school tech director should use

As an educator with 21 years of experience in teaching and learning, I have had the opportunity to work with students of differing abilities and learning backgrounds. During a typical school year, meeting the varied needs of my students makes for an extremely rewarding, but challenging job. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the needs of students tenfold, maximizing both the rewards and challenges of my role as an educator. 

As the world begins to shift in the evolving post-pandemic environment, it’s clear that much has changed. In my opinion, K-12 education has seen tremendous changes whose impacts we will be assessing and addressing for years to come. 

However, as educators begin to consider how to evolve education to meet the needs of our students today and in the future, we have before us the enormous task of shoring up students’ academic skills that may have eroded during the “emergency teaching” era.

As a Language Arts teacher, I’ve found that one of the skills my students need to improve is their basic research skills. Student media literacy, citing their sources, and communicating their results are all critical research skills my students need to brush up on.

The good news is that there are a host of edtech resources to support this. Here are some of the resources my colleagues and I are using to support students as they improve their research skills in a changing education landscape: 

Edpuzzle is an excellent resource that helps students learn the basics of almost any topic. I find this program to be helpful because I can assign a group of students via Google Classroom videos to watch and take notes on. If I want, I can even include an assessment to see if students are absorbing the information within the lessons. One excellent features of this resource is that I can take videos and adapt them by embedding my own questions or audio. Then, once I assign the content, I can see who watched the video. In addition, students can re-watch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, which allows them to learn information they might have missed. 

Today’s students don’t know the world without the internet. They spend days and nights on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat but hardly know how to translate all this information into learning. Gen Z doesn’t necessarily think critically about what they find online.

As educators, we can teach the academic side of the internet to them.

Why is it so critical?

• Online research skills and critical writing are among must-haves for students’ progress through college life and future career.
• Studies show that young people don’t focus on the credibility of sources they use; they can’t explain why they choose certain websites, authors, and publications.
• Surveys demonstrate that many students don’t understand how to use online sources to support their arguments.

Educators can help students evaluate online information efficiently. Its volume keeps growing, and it’s significant for young people to know how to separate the gems from the garbage and become critical writers and consumers, not just viewers.

When the pandemic prompted schools to quickly shift to distance learning last spring, educators became responsible for using online technologies to teach students. This was the first time that many educators had to grapple not only with virtual classroom management, but with helping their students learn the ins and outs of staying safe online. This included a crash course in learning and behaving online.

This set of “online manners” is referred to as digital citizenship, which is how we should behave when using digital tools, interacting with others online, and becoming better stewards of technology.

As a leader of a nonprofit where young kids connect and learn online, we prioritize teaching kids these important skills that will take them well into adulthood.