Comic – Digital Permanence

Student Objectives:
Using a word processing program, students will be able to create a comic illustrating their knowledge of “digital permanence”.

Instructions:
PART 1
1. Students will watch by the National Ad Council:

• Everyone Knows Your Name
• “Bulletin Board – Think Before you Post”
• “Click” – Radio Ad
• “Ding” – Radio Ad

and

• Protecting Reputations Online in Plain English

2. Read Power to Learn Case Study – Digital Permanence: Forever is a Long Time

3. Read – Think Before You Post Web site

4. Summarize case studies with students (the following was taken from: Power to Learn teacher’s guide )

1. Posting – Two players don’t like their soccer coach. To get back at him, they put some stories about how he hit one of the players and swore all the time during practice up on their MySpace and Facebook pages. The stories weren’t actually true. They also posted rude things about other players. Friends warn them to take their comments down and they do – but not before the coach sees them. The coach could have suspended them, but instead he copies the stories and tells them that if college admissions counselors or college coaches contact him for references, he will attach a copy of what they did to his reference comments.
2. Pictures – Two girls stage pictures and videos of their friends drinking and taking drugs at a party and post them on Facebook, YouTube and in a blog. They identify everyone in the pictures. No one thinks much about it until kids in the pictures don’t get into the colleges of their choice, get the internship they want or a dream summer job.
3. People – In South Korea a woman’s small dog poops on the subway and despite being politely asked to clean it up, doesn’t do so. Someone snaps a picture of her and of the old man who cleans up after her and posts it online. She becomes known as “dog poop girl” and people find her out, insult her, force her to quit her university and ruin her reputation.

5. Review ways to keep from getting into similar issues with digital permanence:

• Before posting anything online you have to ask yourself, how am I going to feel if ….(and you can pick what’s most apropos here for your life) the college admissions officer, my future employer, my grandmother, my parents, my teachers, my friends, my teammates, etc….are going to see this? Is really worth risking what you’ve worked so hard for to put this up online?
• Do a Google search on your name once a month or more. If you find something you don’t like, do what you have to get it deleted and make sure it stays that way.
• Don’t trust anyone to do the right thing by you. If you are at party and someone is taking pictures, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want up online. Even if they say they won’t, people love to put up pictures that are a little risqué, incriminating, or a shot of something you wouldn’t ordinarily do. The same goes for when you are out and about in the rest of the world, too.
• Talk to your friends about how you are all connected. The truth is that anybody these days can make it look like friends or foes are doing things they are not supposed to by showing partial clips of videos, altering pictures, hacking into other people’s accounts, changing the wording of a forwarded email or IM or worse. If you stick together and don’t let anyone do this to each other, you will all be better for it.
• Tell your friends to let you know if they see anything online about you, whether they think you’ll like it or not, and do the same for them.
• Rise above it. Never put anything up online about someone that could be considered offensive, shows them doing something illegal or underhanded, or worse–even if you are angry at them. This includes IMs and emails as well as chat rooms, blogs and social networking sites. It’s so easy to get back at you these days!
• Don’t give anyone the passwords for your accounts on MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking sites, your blog, your email account or anything online that is supposed to be “private.”
• Take down anything on your online pages right away that you don’t like or seems out of line. You have no idea who might copy it and where it might show up next.
• Don’t trust, monitor. That goes for your whole online presence. Don’t put anything on a site you can’t easily delete from.
• Be a self-censor.

PART 2
Students will:

1. Work with a partner to brainstorm an idea for their comic.
2. Create a storyboard/layout for their comic.
3. Set up a comic in MS Word following student directions below (each student will create a file in MS Word).

Directions for Comic Set Up in Word

Comic – Worksheet & Rubric