Archive for category Year 6 – Digital Leadership
Year 6 – Digital Leadership explores CyberBullying and Plagiarism
Habit of Mind Focus #6: Striving for Accuracy
Successful and admired people often have traits of precision and accuracy. You can’t succeed at anything if you aren’t accurate in your information. It is easy to copy and paste from the net, but the ramifications can be huge – incorrect or biased information or even plagiarism. When using online tools, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of those people who are also affected by our actions. If you researching a topic, you have to remember that a great deal of content on the internet belongs to other people, so you can’t just take it and so it is yours. You have to purchase that content, get permission to use it or acknowledge the sources.
Nowadays, mobile phones are small computers. These ‘Smart Phones’ have all the features of computers, but have the added extras or telephone communications and mobility. Used incorrectly, they can be very dangerous and harmful.
Here are a few things that parents and students need to remember about mobile phones:
- It is easy to go over your allowed data, talk and text usage quota, especially in the holidays. Set up the wireless feature so that the phone automatically uses wireless at home, saving data usage. Also, find an app that will regularly and accurately show your usage, and keep checking it for updated data (Consume is a good one for iPhones)
- In Australia, under the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Telecommunications Offences and Other Measures) Act (No. 2) 2004, it is an offence to use a telecommunications network or carriage service to make a threat, menace, harass or cause offence. This means that you are liable if you use your mobile or smart phone to bully or seek to cause harm to other people
- Phones and telcos do have controls and settings that can be used to make the use of these devices safer. For example, turning off the geo-tag feature stops any images taken by the phone attaching location meta-data to the image
Geo Tagging Dangers
- Passwords should be used on the phone or at least the sim card. If a phone is lost and has no password, people can easily use it or steal the phone
- Smart phones allow internet access almost anywhere – bedrooms, cars, schools, bathrooms, etc. Parents need to make sure that they have family about where their kids can use their smart phones
- Sexting involves sending inappropriate images via text. It is an offence to have position of inappropriate of under-age children, even if you were sent the image unwittingly. Delete any inappropriate images immediately
Mobile phones need to be used correctly otherwise they can cause physical problems as well. here are some tips for you and your parents:
Social networking involves the use of social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to communicate. They can be used socially, that is, between friends and acquaintances, or in a business or commercial context. They can also be used to spread the news; like a football team keeping tabs on the game for people on Twitter who an’t watch or listen to the live coverage. Kids like social networks because they can keep up with their friends and that is the most important thing in their lives right now. However, the technology is so advanced, features like image, geo and face tagging can violate innocent users’ rights and put them in harm’s way.
All of these networking tools have an age limit, and for good reason. Children under the recommended ages often don’t know how to interact or deal with situations that could include adults. They don’t have the skills to differentiate between fact or fiction.
Parents, you will find this tip sheet very helpful to enable you to understand social networking, its dangers and what you can do make your child less vulnerable.
Students, remember these points, as listed in OnGuardOnline’s Kids and Socializing Online page:
You should post only what they’re comfortable with others seeing
Once you post it, you can’t take it back
Do not impersonate someone else
Understand that certain information should stay private
Avoid talking about intimate or inappropriate subjects online
Politeness counts so tone it down and stay calm
Cc: and Reply all: with care
Use privacy settings
Create a safe screen name
Review your friends list; do you know all of these people?
Trust your instincts if you have suspicions
After watching the above video, identify all the ways that Jennifer’s safety was compromised by her ‘friend’.
Sometimes on the internet, you can’t gauge how someone is feeling because you can’t see their face. You might think you are making a joke, but they could take it seriously. Also, you really need to know if a friend is really the person who you think they are representing. The video below has some great lessons about friends on the net.
‘Simply put, plagiarism is the use of another’s original words or ideas as though they were your own. Any time you borrow from an original source and do not give proper credit, you have committed plagiarism and copyright laws.’
(Taken from Plagiarism.org, http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_plagiarism_faq.html)
Plagiarism is a bad thing. You can’t take someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. It is illegal and can result in fines, imprisonment and exclusion from university courses. Confused? These videos may help …
After watching the video above, list all the ways that Timmy broke the rules of researching and plagiarised.
Do you have any questions about plagiarism? Now is a good time to ask your teacher or check out this great definition via Plagiarism.org.
When you have used another person’s work, and taken quotes or information that is proprietary to them, you need to acknowledge the source. There are two popular methods of citing – the Harvard system and the APA system. Let’s look at the APA Style, as it is the most commonly accepted citation method and is used extensively in universities.
Plagiarism.org is the best site to refer to when trying to cite correctly and avoid plagiarism. To learn all about the basics of the APA Style and how to use it, click here. Or, watch the following videos which explain how to cite websites with APA Style. The first one deals with ordinary websites with an author and the second deals with those without authors.
You can use the help you create citations and a references list of websites. Click on the image below to go to the Citation Machine: