Lab Entry #8
Social Media, Cyberbullying & Digital Citizenship
Today in class we looked at cyberbullying, online harassment, and digital prevention strategies. Some of the tools we looked at were infographic creation applications and word clouds for creative analysis.
These tools are great professional-like platforms for creation, distribution, as well as informing people of the risks, effects, and causes of cyberbullying. Infographics are especially useful since numbers and statistics can be overwhelming. Infographics condense and convey information in clear and often visually stunning ways.
The infographic I created, using Canva (an infographic and poster creation service) made reference to Captain America. I thought this would be culturally relevant since young kids and young adults will look to Captain America as an emblem of strength, courage and good-will.
Uses for Teachers:
- Infographic creation tools are not only useful for cyberbullying statistics but other kinds of statistical measurements. They could be useful for demographic surveys and studies, so students, for instance, could use it to make infographics about their school population. What programs are students involved in? How old are the students? Where do they live? Where do their families come from? This can give students an idea of how diverse the student demographic is.
- A follow-up idea could be to create strategies to combat racist, sexist and other discriminatory forms of cyberbullying within their own communities. They will use the statistics to identify which groups are more at risk, and how cyberbullying prevention could benefit their peers.
- Students could also be tasked with creating personal infographics about themselves. They can create family trees, survey their family on different aspects of their lives (Where do they come from? How old are they?) And other components that make up their living experience. Students can print and laminate these and put them up in the classroom or the hallways, creating a gallery.
