Cybersecurity Awareness Month - Safety Tips Sheets, Posters, and Lesson Plans

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Stop.Think.Connect. has a large collection of posters, tip sheets, and videos that you can use to promote good online safety practices in your school or office. You can find all of them in this gallery which can be sorted according to resource type (poster, tip sheet, video, meme).

The Stop.Think.Connect. tip sheets can be previewed online then downloaded as PDFs to print and distribute to students and adults. Many of the tip sheets are available in Spanish, French, and Turkish in addition to English. Likewise, the posters in the collection are available in multiple languages.

Here's a couple of the videos from the Stop.Think.Connect. resources gallery.




Free Lesson Plans
Google for Education's Applied Digital Skills lesson library includes a couple of lesson plans that align with Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

• Avoid Online Scams is a lesson plan for middle school and high school classrooms. This lesson includes a scenario in which students have to identify the signs of a scam phone call and email then decide how to respond.
  
  
• Creating strong passwords is a good first line of defense in cybersecurity. In Create and Safeguard Passwords students learn how hackers attempt to crack passwords (hint, it's not random guessing) and how to use that knowledge to create stronger passwords for themselves.

Transcribing Early Copyright Applications

By the People is the Library of Congress project that was formerly known as the Crowd project. The name changed at some point in the last year, but the purpose of the project remains the same. That purpose is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe historical documents housed the by the Library of Congress. Over the years hundreds of thousands of documents related to the American Civil War, baseball, and Women's Suffrage have been transcribed through the By the People project. There are still transcription projects running for documents from presidential collections and the Civil Rights Movement. American Creativity: Early Copyright Title Pages is the latest collection of documents available for viewing and transcribing in the By the People project. 

American Creativity: Early Copyright Title Pages contains hundreds of thousands of title pages from publications submitted to federal courts for copyright protection between 1790 and 1870. As I just learned from reading about the project, until 1870 the process for copyright protecting a work required authors to submit an application, a fee, and a copy of the title page of their work at their local federal court. American Creativity: Early Copyright Title Pages is organized according to decade. You're free to browse through the titles, download covers, and contribute to the transcription. I found it fun to browse and just look at some of the titles and topics that were "trending" in different decades. 

Applications for Education
As I've written in the past, the By the People project can be a good opportunity for high school students and some middle school students to learn while contributing to a national project. All of the collections in By the People do have timelines and some other resources that help to provide context for the documents that are in need of transcription.

The Smithsonian has a similar crowdsourcing project called Smithsonian Digital Volunteers. In this short video I demonstrate and explain how you and your students can participate in the projects.

Webinar Recording - Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions - Season 2, Episode 3

Last Thursday Rushton Hurley and I hosted the third episode of this season of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff. As we alway do we answered a some interesting questions from readers and viewers including questions about Google Slides add-ons, finding copyright-friendly and classroom-friendly pictures, and connecting classrooms. We also shared a couple of cool tools and inspirational videos. If you missed the webinar, you can watch the recording right here and get a list of shared resources here. 

The next live episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions will be on October 28th at 4pm ET/ 1pm PT. You can register for the session right here. 

Get Your Free Copy of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook

Subscribers to my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter received their free copies of the 2021-22 edition of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook at the start of the school year. It's a 75 page PDF that features my favorite tools, tips, and strategies for using a wide variety of educational technology tools in your classroom. If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, you can now get your copy of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook right here. 

Table of contents for the 2021-22 version of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook:
1. Communication with students and parents – page 5
2. Creating Blogs & Websites – page 9
3. Web search strategies – page 16
4. Digital citizenship – page 27
5. Video creation and flipped lessons – page 30
6. Audio recording and publishing – page 42
7. Backchannels and formative assessment – page 44
8. Digital portfolios – page 48
9. Augmented and Virtual Reality – page 50
10. Intro to Programming and Makerspaces – page 54
11. Accessibility Tools – page 59
12. Ten Time-saving ways for teachers to use tech – page 65
13. Remote Instruction Tools and Strategies – page 67
14. DIY Game Creation – page 72

Get your free copy of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook right here. 

Tasks, Spaces, and Cakes - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where we have enjoyed a great week of beautiful fall weather. The nights have been cool, the days have been warm and sunny, and the leaves are turning into vibrant shades of red, yellow, and orange. My daughters can't wait for me to make big piles of leaves to jump in. That's what we'll be doing today. I hope that you have something fun planned for your weekend as well. 

This week I co-hosted another edition of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions. We'll be holding the next episode on October 28th. I hope you'll join us!

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Taskade - A Complete Project Planning Solution for Teachers and Students
2. Two New Google Docs Features to Note
3. How to Turn a Spreadsheet Into Multimedia Flashcards
4. The Science of Cake! - And 83 Other Food Science Lessons
5. How to Add Watermarks to Google Documents
6. Five Google Earth Features for Teachers
7. Spaces - Capturing & Celebrating Student Growth

Thank you for your support!
Your registrations in Practical Ed Tech courses (listed below) help me keep Free Technology for Teachers going.

A big thank you also goes to the companies whose advertising helps keep the lights on.

• Screencastify
• Breakout EDU
• Tract.app
• Make Beliefs Comix
• Taskade
• Spaces

On-demand Professional Development

• Search Strategies Students Need to Know
• A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video
• A Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 38,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fourteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.