In June 2012,
Consumer Reports published an article about Facebook & Your Privacy.
The article included a section on children and Facebook. Facebook has age restriction of 13 years and
up, yet "some 5.6 million underage kids still have accounts." According to the article, Facebook tries to
police the rule and has closed 800,000 accounts. The article goes on to say that while parents
may be aware that their child is on Facebook, most have not had a conversation
with them about online safety or privacy issues. I think many individuals would agree that it
is the parents’ responsibility to take on this role with their children. However, librarians and school librarians
have the background and skills to help teach young people these skills.
The state of Illinois has created a mandatory
K-12 Internet safety curriculum requirement for all schools. In my experience, school librarians have
taken on the role of teaching this curriculum.
There are many resources available to librarians or school librarians to
help develop programming or lesson plans for young people.
ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom has
created a website to spearhead a privacy
revolution. The website has a
variety of tools that include videos, advocacy tips, promotional banners &
icons.
Common
Sense Media has K-12 curriculum lesson plans correlated to standards,
toolkits, a blog, professional development, videos, reproducible worksheets
among other things to help educators and librarians teach about a variety of
digital safety topics.
CyberSmart! Curriculum has a whole host of lesson plans
for every grade level related to online privacy and safety issues.
