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Lesson Plan: Digital Defense – Protecting Your Online Identity

This lesson aligns with the NYSED CSDF standards to equip students with practical strategies to protect their digital identity. As middle school students increasingly engage with social media and gaming platforms, they face real risks related to privacy and online safety. By having students engage in a simulation-based activity, students develop actionable plans that promote responsible digital behavior and cybersecurity practices they carry and apply outside of school. The lesson fosters critical thinking, personal responsibility, and informed decision making in digital environments.

Standards:

4-6.CY.1 Explain why different types of information might need to be protected.

4-6.CY.2 Describe common safeguards for protecting personal information.

4-6.DL.6 Describe persistence of digital information and explain how actions in online spaces can have consequences.

4-6.DL.7 Identify and describe actions in online spaces that could potentially be unsafe or harmful.

4-6.IC.1 Describe computing technologies that have changed the world, and express how those technologies influence, and are influenced by cultural practices.

Learning Objectives:

Students will be able to:

Identify risks associated with social media and gaming platforms

Explain how personal information can be exposed or misused if proper safeguards are not in place

Design a plan to protect their digital identity and online presence

Essential Question: How can we protect our online identity and personal information in online spaces?

Do Now:

1. Ask questions:

What kinds of information do people share online?

Which of those are safe to share? Which are not?

2. Quick Activity where students give thumbs up/thumbs down to examples (username, school name, password, location, etc.

Visual Element on the board: What needs Protection?

1. Create a quick list with students:

Personal information (name, school, location)

Passwords

Photos/Videos

Conversations

2. Emphasize that once something is online, you can’t fully take it back

Mini-Lesson: Covering online risks & safeguards

1. Introduce key risks such as oversharing personal information, weak passwords, talking to strangers, clicking unknown links

2. Introduce safeguards:

Strong passwords/Multi-Factor Authentication methods

Privacy Settings

Not sharing personal information

Thinking before posting

Core Activity: Digital Defense Plan

1. Students are placed in small groups (3-4 students). They are part of a Digital Safety Team where their job is to design a plan that can keep students safe on social media and gaming platforms.

2. Each group receives a scenario card such as:

A student joins a new gaming platform

A student creating a social media account

A student is placed into a group chat online with unknown players

3. Create a Safety Plan based on the scenario provided with the below criteria:

Account Safety

Password rules

Privacy settings

Indetity Protection

Defining what information is safe vs. unsafe to share

Communication

How to interact with others

What to do is something feels unsafe

Response plan – what to do if something goes wrong

Each group defines a scenario of what could go wrong. Then explain what mistake was made and how their plan prevents or fixes it.

Share & Class Discussion

1. Groups present their scenario, their safety plan, and their “what could go wrong” example

2. Classmates discuss what strategies are most effective and which risks are most common

3. Teacher intervenes to synthesize the top 5 rules for staying safe online for students to grasp the concept better

Closure/Exit ticket:

Reflection in digital journal:

1. Define one strategy to protect their online identity

2. Define one risk they didn’t think about before

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AI & Deepfakes: Truth, Trust, and Technology

This lesson dives into a topic touched on in a couple of the sources. AI and Deepfake technology is becoming increasingly used across society and it is important for students to understand how to recognize legitimate information.

9-12.IC.2 Debate laws and regulations that impact the development and use of computing technologies and digital information.

9-12.IC.2: Students will evaluate laws/regulations around AI & deepfakes

9-12.IC.3 Debate issues of ethics related to real world computing technologies.

9-12.IC.3: Students will analyze ethical implications of AI-generated media

Activity:

1. First, I will have students identify what deepfakes are and how they work.

- Deepfakes are AI-generated media that replace a person’s face/voice with someone else’s, often convincingly.

- They are already impacting schools (cyberbullying, misinformation, consent issues).

- TeachAI emphasizes teaching both with and about AI, focusing on ethics, policy, and real-world implications.

2. I will then show clips of famous Deepfake examples and pose some questions.

-  Would you trust this video? Why or why not?

-  What makes something feel real?

3. Some info and more discussion.

- AI uses machine learning + large datasets to generate realistic media

- Deepfakes can: Swap faces, Clone voices, and Generate entirely fake people/videos.

- Class Discussion Prompt: If you can’t trust video anymore, what happens to truth?

A couple ideas for class activities I have:

- First: Students will be put into small groups to analyze Deepfake examples. Each group will notice what purpose these examples are used for and can determine how it can be used positively and or negatively.  I will emphasize responsible AI use and policy discussions.

o   Positive ex. Movies, news, accessibility (voice), education

o   Negative ex. Fake news, cyberbullying, identity theft

-Second: Students will create school appropriate deepfakes of their own based on some set scripts. Ex. A historical speech or an informational script.

o   Looks like a potential tool: https://www.heygen.com/en-in/tool/deepfake-maker

o   Discussion Points: What AI generated. Why it could fool people. Ethical concerns.

4. To take this further I can show clips of real video footage and clips of AI generated deepfakes. Students will have to vote whether they are real or fake as well as why.

-(Facial clues, audio mismatch, and unrealistic movements)

5. I can facilitate a debate whether or not deepfake technology should be regulated or banned. How about in industries like government, tech, students, etc.

6. At the end I could release an exit ticket to assess what students took away from the lesson. Could be a KWL. Could also have questions like: What is one benefit of AI deepfakes? What is one major risk? What is one rule society should create?

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Lesson: AI Ethics

Objective: Students will explore AI intelligence with ethical guidelines

CSDF Standard 9-12.IC.3 Evaluate the social and economic implications of privacy in the context of safety, law, or ethics

Activity

1. Introduction: Discuss how important ethics are in AI, highlighting major issues where ethics are important like bias, privacy, etc.

2. Real world example: Present a real situation where AI has crossed the ethical guidelines. Analyze the outcomes and discuss how ethics were either addressed or overlooked.

3. Group work: Students will work in small groups designing a basic AI system (chatbot) that performs tasks based off prompts that will follow ethical guidelines

4. Using app inventor, students will program their chatbot that follows ethical standards (data privacy, unbiased responses.

5. Presentation: Each group will present their AI chatbot explaining the ethical standards they used. A class discussion will come after to reflect on what they found difficult and what they would have done differently if they were to start over.

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Most Likely Machine Activity

I created a lesson based on the Most Likely Machine algorithm training activity. I attached the entire lesson plan, but here is a summary:

Warm up:

Ink, pair, share for following questions: What is bias? Think about if you were selecting students for “most likely to…” awards for the yearbook, what biases might affect your choices?

Most Likely Machine Activity:

In teams of 3-4, students work together to train the best algorithm to select the winners of the three awards - with the definition of “best” being vague. They start with a jigsaw for the background information, then train the algorithm all together on one computer, debating as they go.

Debate was your algorithm “good” or “bad”?

When students receive the results of their algorithm, they first will read the “learn why” for each of the results to understand how the algorithm works. Then, they will discuss these questions in their group:

Did any of your winners surprise you?

How did you pick which personality traits go with which award?

Were you basing your decision-making on facts or opinions?

Do you think everyone will agree with the features you picked?

Do you think the features describe each person completely?

Finally, each group will prepare a 5 minute mini presentation on whether their algorithm was “good” or “bad”. The requirements are:

Everyone in the group needs to share

Your team must define what good and bad mean

Your team must acknowledge any biases in the outcome

Your team must reference the algorithm results as evidence to support your claim.

Exit Ticket

Vote on which team had the “best” algorithm! Winning team gets a prize.

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The Dark Side of Technology:

After exploring the Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI article from the Teach AI Guidance website, I learned how it is important to teach students that the use of AI can be incorporated into learning but only as a tool. I thought a good way to do this is to highlight the mistakes or inaccuracies that a large language model can have when writing code. So I came up with a task for students to write their own code for a simple program, using notes or materials that we have learned with in the class, and then ask ChatGPT (or any other AI model) to write them code for the same program to see which works better.

Warm-up Discussion:

-              Talk with students about how AI can be a great tool to assist with coding like helping with syntax, debugging and explaining code in understandable terms. But, it is not a one stop shop, there still needs to be an aspect of critical thinking from a human involved.

-              Learning code is still very important because AI can’t do everything, and it helps develop a student’s critical/computational thinking and problem solving skills.

Coding with AI Task:

-              Students will be asked to use ChatGPT to have it write a code for a simple Number guessing game using Python.

-              Students will run that code verbatim and answer the following questions:

o   Do you think that the AI code was correct? Why or why not?

o   Did you fully understand each part of the code?

o   Were there parts that did not work without human changes that had to be made?

Coding without AI Task:

-              Students will be asked to use their own resources and notes to code a simple calculator with Python.

-              They can use class notes, any documentation they can find, or asking peers for assistance but not any AI tools.

-              Questions to answer:

o   Which code worked better?

o   Which code did you understand more?

-              Discussion: Using AI to code for you can produce several risks when put into practice. AI doesn’t know what the requirements for the program are so it can have logic errors, or it can import modules that we do not use in this class or ones that you have no familiarity with.

When you rely too much on AI to do the work for you, it will be difficult to understand and you are taking away from your own learning. Blindly copying code that an AI writes for you can also potentially lead to plagiarism or go against the school’s code of conduct.

-              AI should only be used as a tool to collaborate with and not as a crutch. Student’s should always understand the code and make sure they are following best practices.

Bonus:

One thing that might be useful for advanced students is to give them code written by AI that is intentionally wrong, and they will be challenged to find ways to fix it themselves.

I think the best learning standards for this lesson would be:

9-12.IC.3: Debate issues of ethics related to real-world computing technologies.

And

9-12.IC.5: Describe ways that complex computer systems can be designed for inclusivity and to mitigate unintended consequences.

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I focused on the article “Teach AI Guidance” , and specifically the section “How can Students Become Critical Consumers and responsible Creators of AI?” One section in this was “Information accuracy and Integrity”. My activity will focus on the standards “9-12.NSD.2” which says “Explain the levels of interaction existing between the application software, system software, and hardware of a computing system.”

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The objective of this activity is to have students engage with a space on SchoolAI that is focused on interactions between softwares on a computer. Students will have a prompt to ask SchoolAI the answers to some questions about software, and after finding the answers from SchoolAI, students will be tasked with doing independent research to verify those answers and cite sources. This activity is intended to help students see how AI can be a resource, but also enforce that it cannot be the only resource and that they need to be responsible and look into work on their own as well. While learning this real-life lesson about credibility, they are also focuses on an CSDF standard by understanding the relationship between various softwares in a computer.