EduCon 2.7

If anything, 2014 has been the year of the hacker: each month, we’ve learned about new security breaches that affect millions, and security researchers have exposed several critical code flaws in the infrastructure of the web. The new reality of the Internet we rely on is not “if” but “when” we will be the target of malicious hackers. While educators and students everywhere are encouraged to become digitally literate and to find and use their voices through blogging and social media on the web, however, important digital literacy skills in online security and privacy are overlooked and ignored in favor of focusing on content creation. But because educators are in charge of copious amounts of student data, it is important that they adopt secure online practices to model this valuable tenet of digital literacy to students.

This discussion will focus on the unique security and privacy challenges teachers face in the classroom by exploring the threats facing educators and schools, and discussing privacy issues facing educators as more and more classroom data makes its way online. The goal of this session is to raise security awareness among educators, and to give educators easy-to-implement information security strategies that can minimize privacy breaches in the classroom, in addition to real-world advice on how to secure online accounts to protect student and classroom data and minimize the risks posed by the brute-force technological attacks sweeping across the web. Wherever possible, I will go past just telling educators why they should follow certain security practices and walk through examples of the technological processes (i.e. password cracking, using Google as a hacking tool, etc.) that better demonstrate how easy it is to gain unauthorized access to improperly secured accounts.