Summary
All activities in the eTwinning project “What’s on the News?”, five of them have already finished, the 8th grade students at the elementary school Spinut in Split have participated in, together with their Spanish partners, refer to the enhancement of media literacy in students and developing their awareness about often fake data and disinformation, which are largely present in a vast internet area. By doing this project, the students and the teachers, in a good collaboration, are strengthening togetherness in promoting media literacy. Last year, students took part in the eTwinning event Spring Campaign Media Literacy and Disinformation, where they showed how to create fake news and how important was to estimate data and information relevance and quality. This year, the students together with their teachers, celebrated Safer Internet Day, learning about, unfortunately, omnipresent problem they did not know much about. Phishing, in its all forms, is greatly dangerous and young people should know everything about it in order to take relevant actions to prevent possible problems.
Introduction
Teacher Ivana Bokavšek created this activity which was carried out together with her colleague. The reason for this activity was the fact that her students did not know anything about phishing. Despite the problems caused by Corona-19 pandemic, the students and their teachers managed to do all tasks on time to celebrate Safer Internet Day. Some students did the activities in pairs, some students worked individually in the classroom or online guided by their teachers, and all three phases this activity consisted of were completed: the questionnaire to introduce the topic of phishing, the main part where the students needed to browse relevant and reliable web sites to learn about phishing and its forms, problems caused by phishing, and possible solutions, better to say preventive actions that need to be taken in order to protect themselves from phishing, a common presentation about what they learned using collaborative tool Microsoft Sway, and the last part, evaluation and self-reflection phase where they reflected on the whole process of this activity. All completed tasks and activities were published on the Twinboard of the project Twinspace.
The introductory part of the activity
In the MS Forms questionnaire, which was done as an initial point in learning about phishing, the students answered four questions about the issue of phishing and they needed to ask one question about phishing. The teachers and the students analysed the questionnaire results. They discussed together the importance of this topic and it was concluded that besides all dangers we could face on the internet, it was expected to choose the problem of phishing as one of the issues the project was dealing with, because phishing is extremely threatening for people of all ages.
Figure 1 MS Forms questionnaire: Phishing
Link to the questionnaire results
The main part of the activity
Most part of the students did the task in the classroom. The students were doing the activities in pairs, and some of them individually. The teachers instructed students how to collaboratively make a common presentation using Microsoft Sway, and what to present. The first step was to find the forms of phishing by internet browsing. After that, the students decided which pair or a single student will make research on a particular form of phishing, the following problems that form of phishing could make and finally the solutions to those problems.
Figure 2 A common students’ presentation Phishing?! The problems and the solutions, made using Microsoft Sway
Link to the common presentation
The final part of the activity
After a successfully created, common presentation, the students should have reflected on the whole process of learning in this project activity. By doing a short MS Forms questionnaire, most of them were aware of the extent of the learned subject and which tasks were motivating. Their answers will definitely be useful in a further precise planning of the next project activity.
Figure 3 MS Forms questionnaire on the completed activity-reflection, formative assessment-5th activity
Link to the formative assessment
Conclusion
Teaching students how to be media literate is one of everyday teachers’ priorities. It is important to expose students to different teaching methods and approaches, and questions they need to answer in order to develop the level of their media literacy. By the use of various methodology, we encourage their work self-reliance and making smaller decisions which affect the final result, in this case which and how many information to use from which sources and in the end noting the sources. Reflecting on their participation in this activity contributes to the final assessment of their work. By participating in eTwinning projects and the events with strongly emphasized educational purpose, where students are motivated to think critically, work in team, especially on international level, making our students aware of extreme importance of media literacy gets another, added value.
Author:
Ivana Bokavšek
English teacher, teacher adviser
February 2022
