The project from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte will prepare students to demonstrate digital citizenship and cyber safety. The goal of this project is to increase cyber safety knowledge and skills among middle school students, teachers, and technology facilitators, while creating cyber safety awareness among parents of middle school students. This project will assist in designing a suite of instructional materials and application activities (e.g., e-learning modules, online course and videos) dedicated to bridge the gap in cyber safety education in schools. The project will also provide interdisciplinary research experiences in cyber safety, technology education, and pedagogical practices to both graduate and undergraduate students.

The proposed project will address the following objectives: 1) develop five e-learning modules on cyber safety topics (e.g., cyber bullying, digital footprints, digital identity, digital privacy and digital Netiquette) to communicate the importance of digital citizenship to the students; (2) design and deliver an online course on digital citizenship to 20 technology facilitators and 30 middle school teachers; (3) apply the train-the-trainer model by which the technology facilitators will train the teachers in their schools and classroom teachers train the students after the summer course on digital citizenship; (4) pilot the cyber safety e-learning modules with 200 middle school students in three different school districts and a charter school; and (5) help students create videos on cyber safety and disseminate the videos to their parents and a larger audience through social media. The instructional modules and online course content created will be shared with institutions outside the current scope of the project. Further, the project will establish a teacher education and training pipeline to attract more K-12 educators to the program, equip them with much needed cyber security knowledge and skills, and prepare them for the challenges of educating the next generation.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Graduate Education (DGE)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1723746
Program Officer
Nigamanth Sridhar
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2017-09-01
Budget End
2020-08-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2017
Total Cost
$300,000
Indirect Cost
Name
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Charlotte
State
NC
Country
United States
Zip Code
28223