Smart Footprint : Cybersmart Facilitation

In today's Manaiakalani Cybersmart facilitation, I observed Mr. Matt Goodwin teach a lesson with a focus on having a 'Smart Footprint', which is a critical concept in today's digital age. The lesson centred around managing one's online presence, ensuring that students understood the importance of how they present themselves online.  The purpose of today's student task was to cover some of the more technical and design aspects in Google Draw to create things like a poster. My students learned the importance of managing their online presence and how it can affect their real-life reputation as well as important basic skill in using Google Draw to create DLO's.

MG began the lesson by sharing a poster he'd made of himself with vectors of things 'about' him. He then asked the class what they had learned about him from the pictures shown in the presentation. This opened up a discussion on how the online presence of a person could shape their image in real life.

The teacher stressed the importance of being careful about what students put online, saying, "I'm not going to put that on the internet" when discussing personal information.

My key takeaways from the facilitation :

• Going through things like :
• ...making a new document in a folder
• how to make an image bigger without distorting it - teaching them to use the shift key to keep size consistent...

• is beneficial for both the learners and the kaiako - we often assume at this age that most of them know already.
• MG demonstrated how things your learners should know in order to complete a task online can be made into teaching points when introducing the lesson or doing a guided session - for example how to change a font etc. (Things that may be often overlooked.)

By using Google Drawing, my students were able to practice their Google Drawing skills, as well as practice concepts of leaving a 'smart footprint'. These skills will be valuable for students as they navigate the online world, and my students definitely enjoyed learning how to create using the colour matcher, Remove.bg, and Google Drawing tools. Ngā mihi Mr Goodwin!

If you would like to see this lesson and previous lessons on our class site, you can click here.