Series 1. Online Resilience

 It consists of 8 episodes, approx. 17min.

The series also includes Reflections on social media and cyberbullying: (4min 11sec) and it is accompanied by this resources booklet: https://www.slideshare.net/martzoukou/maddie-is-online-series-1-booklet-with-resources-244677681

An updated version as an eBook is available below:

 

Series 1 asks children to choose the best scenario for dealing with issues of online resilience on social media.

Scenario

Maddie is a preteen girl, whose morning begins with greeting her friends on iPhone ‘messages’ as she gets ready for school. Maddie has an iPhone 5 and a tablet where she uses many different applications: FaceTime, Snap Chat, Pinterest, Instagram and Tik Tok, an App you can use to lip-sync to music and share videos of yourself. Maddie has her own Bitmoji and she regularly uses YouTube, Google photos, Gmail and Skype and she plays Roblox fanatically.

At school, she uses an app called SumDog, which is a maths game you can join with players around the world. Maddie’s phone is not just a tool she uses, it is a facet of her ‘self’. It is part of who she is - part of what makes her human in a growing interconnected online world. By extension, her knowledge and her network of friends online is also interwoven into her sense of self, it is an element of her identity. Although this is her techno self, it is also her real self in many ways.

Maddie’s mother: Maddie’s mother is 37 years old. She finished university in 2002 and she was educated within a fast growing online digital world. Maddie’s mum has good information and technology skills. She is a regular user of search engines, Facebook and WhatsApp. She has mostly learned about the world of social media at home. Maddie’s mum has a demanding job and sometimes she works in the evenings. She is aware that Maddie uses many different apps on her mobile phone but she is very busy to explore all of them or keep up. She lets Maddie play and connect online in the evenings and weekends and she can see that this helps her socialise and play with her friends. However, she is getting increasingly worried because Maddie is spending too much time on her phone. She recently noticed that Maddie is getting increasingly anxious and is not sleeping well but she is not sure what the best approach is. She has ensured that Maddie has a private account on all the different apps she is using but she is constantly worried that she is doing something wrong.

Instructions

Read the above scenario to children (perhaps simplify the words a bit, depending on their age) and ask them what applications they use in their daily life and why.

Ask children to watch carefully the first video (‘Maddie is Online – Introduction’), which introduces the scenario.

Put together the children into teams of three or four.

Explain to the children that there are six different options to choose from. Each team should choose only one option and explain the reason they chose it.


Options:


Ignore the message

Confront the child

Go to mum and ask her what to do

Give the phone to mum

Go to mum and ask her to speak to the child

Unfriend and block the child.





Next steps:

Discuss the options chosen in class.

Play to children videos 2-7 and ask them to reflect upon their choice.

Play to children the last video ‘Maddie is Online – Final Thoughts’.

Teachers/Librarians/Parents (if they are Twitter users) could tweet the name of the school, the different teams’ choice + the reason for choosing it to #maddiesonline. 

In that way, schools will be able to compare findings and learn from each other.

If you have used the series, I would be grateful if you could fill in this short 10 minutes evaluation questionnaire which aims to collect anonymous data from you in relation to how you have used the resource in your teaching and how your students/children interacted with it.

Our work addresses children's lifelong development of information and digital literacy. Your contribution and participation is very valuable.

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