Digital Safety and STEM

@ St Louis

Inform and Empower

After numerous attempts to reschedule our cybersafety student workshops with Inform and Empower, this week we were able to virtually welcome Marty into each of our classrooms.

Our Prep to Year 2 children got to meet Ollie Online. He helped them to think about the ways in which they might be online and what we can do to keep ourselves safe. An example of this was how we must talk to trusted adults whenever we want to go onto the internet and head to a new website or game.

Ollie also shared a brilliant jigsaw model for our children to remember. 

Trusted Adults: people we can talk to about being online, particularly if we feel unhappy, or see something that we don't like.

Keep it private: what information we shouldn't share when we are online.

Green time: balancing our online time with activities that are away from the internet.

Our Year 3 - 6 children spent time responding to quizzes and questions around online safety as well as exploring the rules that exist in social media and other popular gaming apps. It was interesting to learn that every social media app has an age restriction of 13+, as well as how these apps use our personal information.

We met Alex who shared some of his negative experiences online and how he dealt with them. One thing that we realised was the importance of being an upstander whenever we see someone treated unfairly.

Marty gave our older students a tool to help them think about the way in which they use the internet. Check it out below. SMART. KIND. ALERT. BRAVE. STRONG.

Marty also shared some amazing resources with our teachers that he had talked about in our Parent's information night back in June this year.

One great recommendation we wanted to share with our parent community is this ABC show - Help! My Kid Is A Gamer!.

You can find all of the previous episodes by clicking on the picture below.

We hope you find what we share informative and helpful. Please feel free to send over any other helpful resources or articles you find connected to digital safety to me at twood@stlouisaspendale.com

Finally we have been able to resume STEM at school with our year 5 and 6 students.

Year 6

Year 6 started with a bang by returning to our OzHarvest programme focused on food wastage locally and beyond.

Each of the Year 6 classes were able to cook fast fritters from the OzHarvest Hot Recipe book. Most thought they were particularly tasty and were blown away by the individual cost of each serving (46c!)

I'd like to make a public apology to the children of 6RD who made amazing fritters with the absence of one crucial ingredient...cheese! 

If you're interested in making them out home here's the recipe.

Year 5

Keeping Australia Connected has been our STEM focus so far in term 4. We started by exploring the technologies used by the Aboriginal people to help their community survive. These included Eel Traps, Shelter, and Aquaculture.

We then took some time to investigate Budj Bim, an Aboriginal settlement about four hours away from us that's 6600 years old and one of only two World Heritage sites in Victoria.

This week we used what we have discovered so far to design and code our own aquacultures in Minecraft EDU. 

Check them out in our Infographics below.