by Diana Graber
CYBER CIVICS MOMENTS
Detecting Crap
Teach your children how to detect the misinformation they are sure to encounter online by teaching them the acronym C.R.A.P. and its meaning. If C.R.A.P. offends your sensibilities, add another A—C.R.A.A.P.—and explain that it stands for “accuracy.” Your kids can put the C.R.A.P. test to work:
1.Search for fake news. A great way to do this is to sit down with your children and scroll through your Facebook feed, or any social network you might use to get and share news. Together, look for news stories. Keep your eyes open for those with catchy headlines that include words and phrases like “shocking,” “amazing,” or “wait ’til you see this!” Click on one of the stories you find, and apply the test by finding answers to these questions (some “Googling” required):
•Is the website/story current?
•Does the website/story seem reliable?
•Who is the author? What are the author’s credentials?
•Is the information presented accurate?
•What is purpose of the website/article? Do you detect a point of view?
2.If you don’t use Facebook, peruse other social media sites that share news. Many kids get their news from Snapchat, through a feature called “Discover.” If your children use Snapchat, ask them to show you some of the featured stories on Discover. Most are produced by reputable organizations like The Food Network, Seventeen, the New York Times, and National Geographic. See if you can help your children detect misinformation on their own apps.
3.Explain to your children that, today, anyone with a connected device can publish anything online. Tell them that many people use social media to get their news and sometimes even find fake stories there more believable than real news. (A Yale University study found that fake news stories that are repeated, through likes or sharing on social media, are perceived as more accurate than real stories.29) Both Google and Facebook have started cracking down on this phenomenon. Tell your children that Facebook users can report fake stories. Show them how to do so by referring to the steps I outlined earlier in this chapter.
Are You a Consumer or a Producer?
This is a different spin on the “Weigh In” activity in Chapter 4. This time, when your children assess their digital diets, they won’t be looking at how much time they spend with media, but whether they spent that time consuming or producing.
1.Ask your children to track their media use for twenty-four hours on a typical, nonschool day (you can do it, too!). Have them write down all the digital media they use, from the time they wake up to the moment they fall asleep.
2.At the end of the twenty-four hours, have your children sort their media use into two categories: media consumed and media produced. Next, have them total the time spent in each category. This is harder than it sounds, as some media use straddles both categories. Here are some general examples: If they took and posted pictures, that’s producing; if they binge-watched YouTube videos, that’s consuming. However, if they used YouTube to make and post a video, or commented on another person’s video, that’s producing.
3.It helps kids to visualize consumption vs. production, so encourage them to convert their data into a pie chart, a great math skill. Here is an example from one of my students:
4.Look at your lists and pie charts and talk. Ask your children questions: Did you spend more time producing or consuming? What did you produce? What skills did you learn or use as producers? In what ways can you produce more and consume less in the future? (Remember, we all need a little consumption now and then, too!). This will help your family shift your media conversations away from “time spent online” and toward “positive use of time spent online.” Good luck!
Chapter 8
Digital Leadership
So, it seems that we are faced with a remarkable irony: in an age of increasing artificiality, children first need to sink their hands deeply into what is real; that in an age of light-speed communication, it is crucial that children take the time to develop their own inner voice; that in an age of incredibly powerful machines we must first teach our children how to use the incredible powers that lie deep within themselves.
— LOWELL MONKE, “THE HUMAN TOUCH”1
Every year I tell my students that while our time together will offer plenty of opportunity for class discussion, the rule is: When I’m talking, they’re listening. It was hard for Luis, a wiry boy with unbridled energy, to obey this simple rule. He was much more interested in chatting with his classmates than in listening to me. Frankly, nothing I had to say seemed to engage Luis. He was always anxious for Cyber Civics to end, so he could head to his favorite activity, recess. I had nearly given up hope of ever connecting with him. But that changed the day of our “app” lesson.
A couple of months into each year, I challenge sixth graders to apply the principles of good citizenship—honesty, compassion, respect, responsibility, and courage—to online communities they might either join or invent. Their task is to create—on paper—a website or app where at least one of these principles would be a central tenet.
Luis was all-in. An avid mountain biker, he decided to “invent” an app called Hurt Alert that would make it easy for bikers, hikers, and others to show compassion for one another when they were out on a trail. Here’s how it would work: Imagine you were mountain biking alone, and you got hurt. The app would automatically notify nearby riders, hikers, runners, or others who were also using the app, letting them know you needed help. If you were setting out for a ride or a hike, you could log in to Hurt Alert, and the app would let others know to keep an eye out for you or that you were available to help them if needed. Luis was so excited about his idea that this normally unengaged student followed me around the room for the entirety of the class, pen and paper in hand, explaining every feature of his app in excruciating detail. He even gave up a good portion of his coveted recess time to finish telling me about Hurt Alert.
To be fair, since I’m an avid mountain biker, too, I may have egged Luis on with my own enthusiasm. “What a great idea,” I thought the next day, as I headed out on a solo mountain bike ride. I was thinking about Luis and his app when, mid-turn, I hit some loose dirt, lost traction, and fell. I wasn’t hurt, but did find myself in an awkward position and temporarily unable to twist my shoe out of the pedal it was clipped into. As I lay there, trying to dislodge myself, I thought about how particularly handy it would have been to have Luis’s app on my phone.
The next time I saw Luis, I told him what happened and how I had wished for his app. His face lit up. Then he turned serious and admonished me, “Ms. Graber, it isn’t wise for you to ride alone. I’d better get that app made right away.”
IT SHOULDN’T BE THAT HARD TO DO GOOD
Whether or not Luis takes the next step—learning how to make an app— remains to be seen. But the point is that, via this simple activity, Luis and his classmates got to imagine how they might use their powerful devices in positive and world-improving ways. This seems important as we watch so many apps and websites add socially beneficial features as an afterthought, or only in response to public outcry. Let me present a few examples:
•A 2017 report that pegged Instagram as the worst social media network for mental health and well-being recommended that the app, and other apps, “identify users who could be suffering from mental health problems by their posts and other data and provide them with discreet information about where they can find help.”2 Shortly thereafter, Instagram added “three new safety and kindness features,” including one that lets users flag others who may need help.3 Now, if notified, Instagram will send those users a message of support, and provide options for where to turn for help.
•After being widely criticized for failing to address cyberbullying on its site, Twitter began placing online bullies in “time out” in early 2017. Today, bullies “will have the reach of their tweets temporarily restricted. During this time, abusers’ tweets will only be shown to their followers.”4
•Through a campaign called “Stop, Speak, Support,” the UK’s Prince William convinced both Facebook and Snapchat to initiate a trial program that would support cyberbullying victims and implement safety guidelines for internet users. According to a news report, “For the first time ever the world’s social media firms are adapting their platforms to provide direct access to support when bullying strikes.”5 Prince William stated he hopes this program “can become a global blueprint.”6
While these are wonderful developments, they beg the question: What took so damn long?
Features to protect users and combat online cruelty should not be addons—they should be prerequisites. They should be the civic responsibility of every app maker. They should be as ubiquitous as seat belts for cars.
For these reasons, I challenge students to imagine the functionalities they would build into the apps/sites/services they might develop one day. Here are some ideas they’ve offered:
•Algorithms that detect and then automatically transform mean comments into kind ones.
•Software that sends bullies two warnings and then, upon a third transgression, immediately deletes their accounts. Additionally, if bullies try to open new accounts, even under different usernames, “software will detect and block them.”
•An app that facilitates the delivery of food to the homeless (via drone, of course), every time a paying customer orders a meal.
In an age when the world’s biggest and most influential social media network, Facebook, was born in a college dorm room, anything seems possible. The only obstacle standing between good ideas and reality is a few lines of code, and even that isn’t much of a deterrent these days.
My students routinely ask me if they are going to learn to code during our Cyber Civics classes. “I’m sorry, but no,” I told a towheaded sixth grader named Jake when he asked me this question one year. “But you should check out Codeacademy.com,” I suggested.
Codeacademy is an online site that offers free coding classes in twelve different programming languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more. I had heard of young kids learning to code from this site, and had even tried a few lessons myself and found them pretty easy and fun. I recommend it to my students and usually never hear about it again.
Except for the afternoon I was helping an eighth-grade class with their end-of-the-year presentations. They were using various online presentation tools I’d shown them, when one of the girls ran into a technical glitch; she couldn’t get her audio to play in sync with her presentation. Since I had no idea how to help her, she asked if she could go get technical assistance. “Sure,” I said, and a few minutes later saw Jake walk into the room. In the time it took me to figure out that Jake was the “technical assistance” she was referring to, he had hacked into the site and was writing code that would allow his sister’s audio to play.
“Jake, where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.
“On Codeacademy,” he responded, reminding me that I had recommended it to him.
“I visited Codeacademy for one hour every night before I went to bed. My mom timed me,” he said. “I had to do two of the languages twice through, but now I’m fairly proficient in both,” and with a quick smile he slipped out of the room and returned to his sixth-grade class.
WHEN KIDS MAKE GOOD APPS
Early one morning, I received a phone call from Lucy Cadova. She was responding to my request for information about FaceUp.com, an antibullying app that connects threatened or harassed students with the adult staff members of a school. According to the app’s impressive website, a group of friends came up with the idea for FaceUp because they found high school life to be “anything but rainbows and unicorns.”7
Cadova was calling from Brno, a city located in the southeastern region of the Czech Republic (I’d seen a California address on FaceUp’s website, so this surprised me). She immediately apologized for her English (which, aside from a slight accent, was nearly perfect) and said she’d “been studying English longer” than anyone else on FaceUp’s small staff, who were mostly still in high school; Cadova told me she had just turned eighteen. Thus, it fell on her to return calls to the U.S., which she did after school.
FaceUp was not the group’s first venture. They had already launched a website where students anonymously report bullying. Per Cadova, 20 percent of the schools in the Czech Republic use it.
That success encouraged the friends to think bigger. As Cadova told me, “There’s no time to stop when you want to help someone.”
Although each of the kids on the FaceUp team has experienced bullying firsthand, the app—the brainchild of Jan Slama—was designed primarily with bystanders in mind. Cadova told me that kids often stand by and watch bullying happen because they have no idea how to help without exposing themselves to bullying. “FaceUp enables anyone to speak up for a friend, for someone you don’t know that much, or even for yourself without the risk of being exposed,” she explained.
What an interesting twist on anonymity, I thought. Usually, anonymous apps like Ask.fm, Whisper, After School, and others earn an automatic bad rap simply for being anonymous. Everyone figures that, because kids can hide their true identities, they use the apps primarily to bully. FaceUp turns this notion upside down, with the premise that kids who need help or want to help others may want to remain anonymous, too.
Cadova said that FaceUp, a free app for schools, has three main features. First are “reports,” an “easy, anonymous way to speak up and seek help for yourself or someone else.” The next feature, “messaging,” is a real-time chat that lets kids anonymously seek help from a teacher, counselor, or administrator. “Sometimes it’s not easy to talk about problems face-to-face,” Cadova explained. Finally, there’s an SOS button for emergency situations. “Like a fight in school, or something that needs immediate action,” she told me.
When I asked how the team was marketing the app, she giggled. “It’s hard to call it marketing—we are just a group of kids.” But these kids had just returned from Silicon Valley, where they met with mentors, teachers, and representatives from schools considering use of the app. Two schools in the San Francisco area had already signed up. Cadova told me that in the past two weeks she’d probably talked to over forty U.S. schools, “but with school and spring break, I really need to catch up,” she said.
FaceUp is one of the many apps created by young entrepreneurs hoping to make the world a better place. Here are a few more:
•After watching her mother struggle to get her grandfather, who suffered from dementia, to remember to take his medication, thirteen-year-old Ellie Tilford and five of her middle school classmates created Pharm Alarm. In addition to reminding users to take their meds, this app sends a prerecorded message to three emergency contacts if the user forgets. If the contacts don’t respond in a set amount of time, the user’s doctor is notified.
•Sixteen-year-old Natalie Hampton created the Sit With Us app to help kids find someone to sit with in the school lunchroom. Using her app, kids can communicate privately to set up safe tables, where they can eat in others’ company and don’t have to suffer the humiliation of eating alone.
•Teenage girls in India used the MIT App Inventor, a free tool for making apps, to create Paani, an app that helps women and children stay safe while collecting water at the community tap in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. The app creates an online queue and alerts households when it’s their turn to collect water, helping them avoid the wait in long, sometimes unsafe, lines.
Discovering these amazing, kid-created apps made me wonder what would happen if all kids had the opportunity or were encouraged to use their creativity, ingenuity, empathy, and kindness online. What if we spent less time focusing on the terrible ways kids use tech, or the horrible things that tech does to them, and refocused our energies on helping kids become positive creators online, rather than passive consumers? What if we celebrated kids when they lived up to this vision? Thank goodness, someone does.
Matt Soeth is a tall, affable guy who hails from California. This former high school teacher is the founder, along with teacher Kim Karr, of #ICAN-HELP, an organization that aims “to educate and empower students to use social media positively.”8
“So much of the conversation out there is on the negative things happening to kids,” Soeth told me. “Every news story, every report, every warning, every moral panic and fear, is all about how we need to protect kids and that they can’t take care of themselves. Our reality at school is that, with the right training and guidance, kids do some really amazing stuff.”9
Soeth and Karr decided to highlight that stuff by launching #Digital4Good, an event that celebrates “student voice and digital leadership in social media.” He told me that this one-day event, staged at Twitter’s national headquarters in 2017, honors remarkable kids who use their devices in positive ways. Each one is nominated by peers and selected by a panel of educators and industry representatives.
When I asked Soeth to recall last year’s most memorable honoree, he thought of a thirteen-year-old girl named Maeve. “She was our youngest winner,” he said. “She suffered from multiple food allergies and loved to bake. So she started researching recipes, and then making some of her own, and then posting them to a website, until it sort of took off.” According to Soeth, others with similar dietary restrictions gravitated to her site, called Baker Delights: Gluten and Dairy Free Desserts Made from Scratch, and now “she really has quite a following.”
At the #Digital4Good event, all winners present their projects. “Maeve was so nervous,” Soeth told me. That’s understandable, because not only did she have to address approximately a hundred people at Twitter, but the event was also livestreamed to thousands more. According to Soeth, “But Maeve got up on stage and asked, ‘Just because I have an allergy doesn’t mean I can’t eat food that tastes good, does it?’ It was very adorable—you should watch her video.”10
