What cyber safety concepts should we cover?
Teaching cyber safety or cybersecurity to high school students can be a daunting task, given all the online risks they face. What are the important internet safety topics to address with our high school students? In the United States, 50% to 97% of teens aged 13 to 17 years are active on at least one social media platform, so it’s important to cover issues and concerns that revolve around social media platforms. The concepts behind cyber safety involves many of the skills our students are working on in speech therapy, such as critical thinking, inferences, perspective-taking and social communication. It’s functional and relevant to work on cyber smarts with our older students! If online safety is being covered in a high school gen ed classroom, I would support the concepts that are being taught there. If I’m covering them independent of the classroom, I have 5 go-to topics. Here are the concepts I like to cover with my older speech students and my rationale for including them.
Cyberbullying: an internet risk!
According to Digital Futures Initiative, cyberbullying has almost doubled over the last 10 years, 59% of US teens have received intimidating or threatening messages online. According to the Pacer center, children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their nondisabled peers. Since cyberbullying can drastically impact the mental health of the victim, it’s important for students to know how to respond and protect themselves.
Cybersmarts: Online Friendships
Many of our students with speech and language issues want to have a wider circle of friendships. They use the internet daily and many prefer to communicate online over in-person. Students with disabilities may be naive or unaware of online security risks. These factors make them more vulnerable to catfishing, when a person pretends to be someone else online. A catfisher’s goal is to manipulate the victim to gain money or personal information. Catfishing is prevalent across social media platforms and dating apps. Teaching a student how to identify a fake profile on social media is a valuable cyber smarts tool for them. Take a look at the following social media profile from my cyber smarts curriculum, and see if you can identify some signs of a fake profile.
If you identified any of the following, good for you!
- Only 3 posts.
- Not too many followers but they clearly followed thousands of people.
- The profile is not a picture of a person and is a bit blurry.
- Their website (Instawin.com) and their email use different names. Also, few reputable companies use a yahoo email.
- Uses urgent language (enter NOW),
- The “winners” appear to be stock photos, not real winners.
Interent Safety: Online Reputation
Teenagers don’t consider their online reputation. Adolescents are focused on peer friendships and relationships. They don’t consider the long term impact of their online photos, posts and comments. The last thing on their minds is that college admissions, future roomies or dates, and hiring managers often check out your digital footprint. However, a teen’s chances of getting hired are reduced if a potential employer discovers signs of criminal behavior, evidence of drinking or drugs, discriminatory statements, provacative photos or videos, and criticism of a prior employer. Maintaining strict privacy settings on your social media accounts and watching what you post, is important.
Phishing Scams
Phishing scams are getting more sophisticated. While they are most common in emails, they are increasing on social media platforms. If our high school students have weak usernames and passwords, they are vulnerable to hackers and account takeovers. When a teen opens an email that is a phishing attack, they think they are real and may feel that they need to act on it. Heck, phishing scams fool lots of adults! Identifying a phishing scam demands critical thinking-looking for signs that the email or message is not really from a reputable sender.
Here is a checklist from my cyber smarts curriculum:
Screen Addiction
According to Heroes Bible Trivia, 60% of teens admit to a smart phone addiction and 62% of parents of teens aged 14-17 in the U.S. report that their children generally spend more than 4 hours per day on a screen. It was even higher during the pandemic! Addiction to technology is real. Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that tech dependence has the same effect on the brain as drug addiction. According to Newport Academy, teens who use social media and play video games are more anxious and depressed. There is a link between technology and mental health.
Other Cyber Safety Concepts?
Certainly, there are other cyber safety topics you may want to consider with high school students, including threats to “hardware,” such as malware, viruses, and adware. Reading online news with a critical eye is also important.
Cyber Safety Curriculum
Are you looking for a complete curriculum that teaches the cyber safety topics discussed in this post? Check out my internet safety curriculum for teens! It comes with a printable pdf and a set of Boom cards.
Click the image below to see and print and no print version on TPT.
Click here if you are interested only in the no print BOOM cards.
Check out this post on BOOM cards for social skills!
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