During this pandemic, many people are relying more and more on online resources and education. Now, more than ever, kids need guidance on how to navigate online. This past winter, Jane Piraino of the St. Charles Public Library District in Illinois used Google’s program “Be Internet Awesome” to teach kids best practices for navigating the internet. Hopefully her experience will provide inspiration to librarians and teachers who may be looking to beef up digital learning with practical training.
Aimed at kids in grade 3-6, Jane ran this program in the first week of winter break. Coding classes and other tech-minded programming are extremely popular in St. Charles. When she learned of Google’s program, she saw the value in teaching some digital citizenship as a supplement to her sought-after series. Google furnishes presentations to use on categories like “Share with Care,” “Don’t Fall for Fake,” and “It’s Cool to be Kind-” providing the opportunity to learn how to keep personal information safe, how to treat others in a digital world, and how to discern true from false information. Being smart, alert, strong, brave, and kind are the characteristics the program emphasizes. Registration for the class filled quickly, indicating a lot of interest, at least from parents, but actual attendance was lower than expected, probably due to the holiday season. However, kids who did attend were satisfied, and left with new knowledge and understanding from Jane’s instruction and Google’s program.
If you are interested, there are slides available for classroom/library use, and there is also a Family Guide, which outlines much of the same material while remaining oriented on home use of devices and resources. The most prominent feature of Google’s plan is a game called Interland. With an engaging and sophisticated design, Interland has different levels that address issues like password choice, interacting online with kindness, and securing information. Informative without being too pedantic, substantial without being bloated, the game serves as an education in itself. Whether you create a program using the resources or just direct families to the game in a social media post, “Be Internet Awesome” is a great way to share essential information about living an online life.
Posted on behalf of ALSC’s Children and Technology Committee by
Deidre Winterhalter
St. Charles Public Library District, St Charles, Illinois
Holly Eberle
This is an awesome program but as someone from the Illinois suburbs who also ran the Be Internet Awesome program, I would double check with your local school district before doing this. I also had extremely low sign-ups (2-3 kids for all the sessions in a 20 person computer lab). One of those kids told me they did the entire program in school at the beginning of the 2019-20 year so he already did all the activities and games & was bored the entire time. The only child that was engaged was a home-schooled student. The school district in my library district gives students in grades K-12 Google Chromebooks, so it makes sense that they would also use Google’s curriculum.