Fordham Law’s Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) has launched new resources and curriculum for privacy education through its Privacy Educators Program and is embarking on a series of privacy education workshops for New York school administrators hosted in partnership with the Executive Leadership Institute.
CLIP’s newly released resources include a series of short video podcasts to train educators to more effectively teach middle school students about the importance of responsible digital citizenship and how to safeguard their privacy and online reputations. The seven new video podcasts are linked to the Privacy Educators’ curriculum and cover topics such as “Dealing with Social Media,” and “Mobile, Wifi and Facial Recognition,” among others. The podcasts, as well as an updated teacher training manual, lesson plan outlines, and audio-visual aids, are available for download from the Privacy Education website and may be used without charge for non-commercial, educational purposes.
The Privacy Educators Program is a first-of-its-kind effort launched in 2013 to engage middle school students in discussions about privacy and its relevance in their lives. For several years, CLIP’s law student volunteers have taught the Privacy Educators Program at P.S. 191 in New York City, and law schools around the country have used the curriculum to provide courses to public school students in their communities. The development of the Privacy Educators Program was supported by cy pres funds from the NebuAd Class Action Settlement awarded to Fordham CLIP by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and by a grant from the Digital Trust Foundation.
“Coming of age in the online era brings new challenges to adolescence, and privacy education for middle school students is essential in the digital age,” said Joel Reidenberg, the founding academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy. “It is important to teach adolescents and teenagers how to behave online in order to prevent them from making seemingly small choices that carry lifelong consequences.”
Additionally, CLIP has partnered with the Executive Leadership Institute to provide a series of professional development workshops for New York City public middle school principals and assistant principals. The workshops will familiarize these educators with CLIP’s privacy educators curriculum in order to utilize the training materials in their middle schools. The first workshop will be held on November 1 at Fordham Law School.
“We are pleased to announce this new partnership with ELI, which furthers recent efforts to expand the reach of this program,” said Andrea Flink, CLIP’s privacy fellow. “We hope these workshops and training videos will assist schools in implementing privacy education independently.”