Bryan County Middle School is teaching its students to be safe with the technology they have at their fingertips in today’s digital world.
BCMS is in the midst of a “full-out school push toward digital citizenship,” technology resource teacher Dana Mattos told the Bryan County Board of Education at its meeting Thursday night.
Students nowadays are tech-savvier than ever, and most of them have devices such as cellphones and tablet computers, BCMS Principal Mike Tinney pointed out. However, he said, many students don’t think about the unintended consequences that can result from using those gadgets.
“We’re finding out that a lot of these kids don’t realize, if they send a text message or if they’re sending pictures, where that goes,” Tinney told board members. “One inappropriate picture can go across the world in no time, and there’s no taking it back.”
Bryan County Middle is teaching a digital-education curriculum from the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media. Common Sense offers resources tailored to each grade level from kindergarten through 12th to teachers at no cost.
“We want to change the way (students) think,” Mattos said. “We want them to just stop, even if it’s for a second, and think, ‘How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect others?’”
BCMS students are enjoying the Common Sense curriculum, Mattos said, because the lessons are kid-friendly and feel like a computer game to them. The program presents different technology-usage scenarios to students, who travel different paths based on the choices they make.
“Sometimes their paths end up in jail,” Mattos said. “Sometimes their paths end up winning prizes and awards and a great future.”
Bryan County Middle is in the process of becoming a Digital Citizenship-certified school. Only one other middle school in Georgia has earned that designation, Mattos told the school board.
She is encouraging all Bryan County schools to participate to extend the curriculum through all grade levels. School systems with at least 75 percent of their schools certified in the program earn district-wide Digital Citizenship certification.
“We need to get that in all of our schools,” school board member Marianne Smith said.
“I really think that this is important for us as a whole county,” Mattos said. “I think it’s important for us to start teaching these kindergarteners and just continually reinforce those skills.”
One challenge in keeping kids safe on the Internet, according to Mattos, is that new and different methods for communicating online are constantly being developed. She voiced concern over two chat sites she thinks parents don’t know enough about, Oovoo and Omegle.
Both Oovoo and Omegle allow users to be anonymous. In fact, Mattos warned, Omegle’s slogan is, “Talk to strangers.”
“Think about our teenage girls and our teenage guys that are getting on there thinking, ‘I could share my feelings,’” Mattos said. “People have ways of figuring out who you are.”
A misconception Mattos commonly encounters is students thinking that a text or social-media post is gone forever simply because they hit the “delete” button.
“The biggest problem we have is that they don’t understand ‘delete’ is not ‘gone,’” she said. “They think, ‘It’s over. I deleted it.’ They don’t realize that their online choices have offline consequences.”
Such are the challenges with students who have no grasp of a world without the Internet, handheld computers, smartphones, text messaging and apps for seemingly anything. Mattos shared an amusing story from a discussion about explorers in the third-grade class she taught last year.
“This little girl raised her hand and said, ‘Miss Mattos, why didn’t Columbus just use Google Earth?’” she recalled. “And she was serious.
“Honestly, they could not understand,” Mattos continued. “They were like, ‘Wait a minute — there were no cell phones? Did they just not have service?’ They just didn’t get it.”
RHMS mobile lab approved
In other business, the Bryan County Board of Education approved spending $6,500 for a used 26-foot travel trailer from Dick Gore’s RV World to use as a mobile lab for Richmond Hill Middle School’s field-studies program.
The trailer will need to be gutted and converted into a lab, according to RHMS Principal William McGrath. Field studies program coordinator Bob Hodgdon hopes to have the mobile lab up and running by January, McGrath said.
Also, the school board approved several donations from the community, the largest of which was $3,334 from the McAllister Elementary School Parent-Teacher-Student Organization to purchase a swing set to add to the MES playground.
Other donations included two refrigerators from Mungo Homes for McAllister Elementary’s teacher workrooms, and $2,000 from the Richmond Hill Touchdown Club to the Richmond Hill High School Athletic Fund. The Touchdown Club contribution, generated from sponsors advertising on the Wildcat Stadium scoreboard, will support the general athletic fund for all sports at RHHS.