Cyber Safety, Information Literacy, Problem Solving, and Einstein

(Podcast Version)

Hi Folks. This is Art Wolinsky with another episode of 3DWiredSafety.

My goal as Educational Technology Director of WiredSafety is to help make students cyber safe and information liteate. To that end, I'm working on a series of lessons that will help teachers make students safe within the context of teaching information literacy and critical thinking.

Right now I am finishing up an activity that has students tracking down a hacker who has stolen three unreleased movies from the a major studio's computers. When they are done, they will have learned some important problem solving skills. They will learn how to organize pieces of seeming unrelated bits of information to form and complete and complex picture. They will understand the concept of proof and use it while learning three different problem solving techniques. They will do detective work that is well beyond what you or they might expect and when it's over they will come to the realization that cyber predators use these same techniques to piece together seemingly innocent pieces of information to piece together a picture of someone they are grooming and planning to take advantage of.

Students will actually be working with an adaptaion of Einstein's famous puzzle. When he originally created it, he estimated that only 2% of the world's population would be able to solve it. The lesson package will contain everything the teacher needs to help students solve the problem and learn some very critical problem solving skills and citical thinking concept.

I've presented this lesson at education conferences and workshops around the country with great success and it classrooms from grade three on up through seniors in high school. A big part of that success is the fact that I have taken Einstein's text and turned it into a visual problem to suit today's generation of visual learners.

The core of the package will be three Flash presentations. The first is the teacher lesson plan that includes an overview, objectives, procedures, lists material, the ALA Information Literacy Standards being addressed, and evaluation suggestions. This and the other two Flash presentations will also be available as a PowerPoint and in Word format. The second presentation is the student introduction and instructions. The third is the step by step solution.

Also included in the package, will be a printable matrix and puzzle pieces for students to solve the puzzle visually, a printable snapshot of the completed matrix as a first level answer key for the teacher, and for schools that have Inspiration software, there will be an Inspiration puzzle template they can use to do the activity on computers.

You can watch this blog or podcast for information about where you can get this material, or if you want to be notified when it is avaialable, just drop me a line at awolinsky@3dwriting.com.

Till next time, this is Art Wolinsky for WiredSafety helping to make your kids cybersafe and information literate.