Over the past month, in our Cybersmart lessons we have been learning to be upstanders when we see things going wrong online and in person.

Some of the things we need to do to be upstanders can be hard, but we know that we can do this – especially if we use the skills we have learnt.

Over our lessons we have learnt about things like Scratch and Google Slides to make animations, Google Draw for posters and Google Slides to make pick-a-paths. We’ve also played interland to help us with making right decisions.

Whaea Stacey then gave us a task where we could choose the way we showed our learning from an online taskboard. Some of the things we could do were: videos, games, animations, podcasts or stories. We chose a variety of things. Here is some of our work.

From our class we had: 3 PE type games.
In one, we had to jump in a hoop with a person from the opposite team, the person who was fastest to say a compliment to the other person added a hoop to their line. The first team to run out of hoops was the winner.
In another, we put our football skills to the test by answering upstanding questions and passing the ball along our team if we got the questions right. After scoring a goal in football, we had to try and get a basketball shot up.
The third activity was an obstacle course and you couldn’t move onto the next part until you answered a question correctly.

We had lots of pick-a-paths and animations, as well as a kahoot!

4 people in our class became newscasters and interviewed other people.

We also had a few board games made, and some stories. One of the groups who wrote a story even took it to the younger students!

We also had a game which incorporated being an Upstander with learning Te Reo Māori!

Today in our ICF sessions, Whaea Stacey taught us about copyright and free use for images and music that we can use.

While most of us knew how to use remove.bg to remove backgrounds of images, it was a good reminder to us and a new concept learnt for everyone who didn’t. We then had to place ourselves in a picture. Can you find us?

We learnt to use the explore tool to find images, rather than going through google as well as how to attribute pictures to say who took the photo.

Some of us had some time to create badges for people.

We have been learning about our online footprint. We have learned that everything we share online can be searched, copied, shared, and is permanent. We learned this by watching a video and talking about what we’d seen; we also talked about times when we’ve shared something online and it’s been copied and shared without our permission. This is important information to learn because we have started our class blog, so we are actively sharing information online, during class time.

We collected screenshots of the places we visited online in the last 24 hours and inserted them onto our footprint. We also took a selfie to go with our footprint. We learned how to change the shape of our selfie by using Mask tool in Google Slides.

Here is a slidedeck of our footprints. We hope you enjoy looking through them.

We have been learning about being in the right place at the right time when we are online. To help us navigate to the right place we learned about how to create and personalise bookmarks. Then we made sure that our Bookmarks Bar was well-organised so that we can quickly find the online places that we need. 

To demonstrate our understanding of the use and importance of bookmarks, we created a poster using a blank Google Draw canvas. We had to create a poster, which included adding a link to text, adding a link to an image, and using word art. These were all new skills for us in Google Draw.

Here is a slidedeck of some of our finished posters.

Last week we learned about four different social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Snapchat. We learned that sometimes what age the app suggests is appropriate to become a subscriber is quite different to what our parents or commonsense.org might think about this topic.

This lesson tied in with what we’ve been learning about our digital footprint and appropriate audiences for different types of information. We also learned that if we falsify our birthdate when signing up for an app then we lose the protection of the law if something goes wrong for us online.

Here is an example of the information we gathered.