As children are exposed to technology and cyber learning at a younger and younger age, there is a growing need to prepare K-12 students to navigate the digital world. The UNC Charlotte Cato College of Education has earned the opportunity to do just that by designing a cyber safety curriculum that will be implemented with teachers, technology facilitators, middle school students and parents from three school districts and a charter school in the Charlotte region.
Supported by a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the project will implement cyber safety modules with 200 middle grade students from four schools from Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cabarrus County and Kannapolis City school districts and the Lake Norman Charter School.
The UNC Charlotte team collaborating includes experts from a variety of fields:
- Instructional systems technology – Associate Professor Florence Martin
- Middle school teacher education – Associate Professor Teresa Petty
- Cybersecurity – Associate Professor Weichao Wang
- Research methodology and program evaluation - Professor Chuang Wang
- Instructional design – Associate Professor Patti Wilkins
Martin is the principal investigator on the grant; Wang, Wang and Petty are co-principal investigators.
The inclusion of faculty from various programs will make it possible to take cybersecurity concepts to the middle school classrooms and to teachers and technology facilitators.
Research shows students exposed to digital media at a young age are at risk of cyberbullying, leaving digital footprints and inappropriate social media posts, and 9 to 15 percent of K-12 students report they have been cyberbullied in the last year.
The UNC Charlotte project has five main goals:
- Develop five e-learning modules on cyber safety topics to communicate the importance of digital citizenship to students
- Design and deliver an online course on digital citizenship to 20 technology facilitators and 30 middle school teachers
- Apply the train-the-trainer model by which the technology facilitators will train the teachers in their schools and classroom teachers train the students after the summer course on digital citizenship.
- Pilot the cyber safety e-learning modules with 200 middle school students in three different school districts and a charter school
- Empower students to create videos on cyber safety and disseminate the videos created to their parents and to a larger audience through social media
“This program will provide a new method to train qualified teachers and technology facilitators for K-12 so that they can bridge the gap in cyber safety education in the schools,” Martin said.
She added, through this curriculum, the importance of digital citizenship and cyber safety will reach thousands of young children so that they can better protect themselves in this network age. The proposed materials will provide transformative learning experiences and knowledge for these teachers and technology facilitators in this field.
Photo (l to r) Chuang Wang, Patti Wilkins, Florence Martin, Teresa Petty and Weichao Wang