Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

This past Friday we had our monthly meeting of the youth advisory, during which we really delved into the process we started last month of creating a series of teen focused workshops on issues related to digital media. The driving question behind the development of these workshops: What do teens need to know about digital media usage that they do not?

Over the past half-dozen or so years, Global Kids staff, most of which work on the ground in New York City public high schools, have come across all sorts of new challenges in regards to our students' use of the internet, cell phones and games. From figuring out ways to circumvent blocks that schools put up for certain web sites to socializing in what often seemed like imprudent ways on sites like MySpace, it was clear that some discussion and education, for both staff and teens, needed to happen. And while the Online Leadership Program conducts educational programs that use digital media and often (though not always) have teens actively reflecting on many of the social issues surrounding digital media usage, this is only a fraction of the teens we work with on the ground.

So this year, we decided to start on the process of developing a core curriculum that directly addressed these issues, and that could be taught in afterschool programs at all of our school sites across this city. Rather than come from the top down in developing this curriculum, we figured it best to start with the teens themselves, and who better to go to than a youth advisory on digital media?

In the last meeting that we had, we began the process by brainstorming a myriad of topics relating to digital media usage that the teens felt could be included in this series of workshops. This month, after narrowing down that large list, we began the research process into four broad areas:

Protecting yourself online – Socially
How can teens:
- Recognize email scams, credit card phishing?
- Deal with ‘cyberbullies’, ‘griefers’ and online troublemakers?
- Protect themselves from sexual predators?
- Know when and how they can safely use credit cards?

Protecting yourself online - Technically
How can teens:
- Safety surf the web?
- Avoid viruses, hacking, popups, spyware/malware?
- Know how to deal with an infected computer?

Piracy, File Sharing, Remixing and Fair Use
How can teens:
- Know what intellectual property is, and why it's important?
- Know when it's ok to download content (music, videos, software) from the internet?
- Know when something is copyrighted?
- Create intellectual property of their own and determine how it will be used?
- Advocate for their own right to fairly and legally use the copyrighted material of others?

Credibility
How can teens:
- Determine whether information they find online is credible and accurate?
- Know where to go to find accurate information?
- Recognize and differentiate between amateur and expert content online?
- Understand how website design factors play into their own process of determining whether something is credible?

By the end of the workshop, we had some incredible facts and resources relating to these areas, and are working to compile them into a research base upon which both the Online Leadership Program staff and the youth advisory will work from to synthesize factsheets and activities that can be included as part of workshops. Can't wait to see how this process develops!

Check out some pics from the workshop:

Ross gets the facts on credibility!

Nafiza and Jean brainstorm about what the potential dangers are for teens that don't know how to protect themselves online from scams, cyberbullies and predators.