Big Big Data

Digital Literacy and Online Safety (Y8) - Lesson 2

A note about this lesson

Common Sense Education

This lesson is taken from Common Sense Education’s excellent Digital Citizenship curriculum. Their resources are shared for free under A Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You can find the original resources HERE. 

Objectives

  • Explain why information about them and their behaviours is valuable to companies.
  • Analyse how certain types of data are used by companies.
  • Learn three strategies to limit individual data collection by companies.

Lesson Resources

Digital Literacy and Online Safety (Y8)

Lesson 1 - My Media Use: A Personal Challenge

Lesson 2 - Big Big Data

Lesson 3 - The Power of Digital Footprints

Lesson 4 - My Social Media Life

Lesson 5 - Upstanders and Allies

Lesson 6 - Copyright and Fair Dealing

Links to Education for a Connected World.

This lesson from Common Sense Media's Digital Citizenship curriculum links to the following strands from the Privacy and Security section of the Education for a Connected World framework.

Warm-Up: People Products

10 mins.

1. Say:Imagine you had the opportunity to design a brand-new product for teenagers. You can have any amount of money and materials you need. How would you come up with an idea? What questions would you ask? Take turns sharing with a partner. (Slide 4)

Invite learners to share their ideas. Explain that the most important questions you might ask are related to teenagers themselves: What do they need? What do they like? What's important to them?

2. Explain that this is actually how companies and individuals think when they're designing products. For their products to be successful, first they need to know what consumers need, like and want. Define consumer as a person who buys products or services to use. (Slide 5)
3. Ask: How do you think companies go about figuring that out? How do they learn what people will want to buy?

Invite learners to share their responses. Explain that companies often do surveys of consumers as well as focus groups (talking to people), and they look at online data. Define data as facts and statistics collected together to be used for different purposes. (Slide 6)

4. Ask:What kinds of data do you think companies look at the most?

Invite learners to share their responses. Explain that one common type of data is online behavioural data: Companies want to know what their customers like to do, which sites they visit and which other products they buy. They use this information to design new products and to market existing products to new customers.

For example, if a company that makes cat food learns that a lot of their customers also buy dog food, they might start making dog food themselves, or they might start putting advertisements for dog food near the cat food, or they might do both.

5. Say:There are many ways that companies get behavioural data: from their own websites, from other companies' websites and from companies that collect data about people's online behaviours. Today we're going to learn more about how this works.

 

Create: ThreadMeister

25 mins.

1. Distribute the ThreadMeister handout and read the directions aloud.
2. ProjectSlide 7 and review the steps for completing the project. For Part 2, learners can either hand-draw their product, or they can use an online tool such as "Adobe Spark" to create it. Learners can also work in pairs or groups.
3. Allow learners 15 minutes to work on their products, and then invite individuals or pairs to share their ideas with the class. Highlight ways that learners used the consumer data to make decisions about the design of their product.

 

Wrap-Up Exercise

10 mins.

1. Explain that even though you might appreciate that companies use behavioural information about you to make products you want, there can also be a downside: Companies will often use this information to do targeted advertising, which is when apps or websites use information that they have collected about you to show you certain types of advertisements. (Slide 8) Explain that targeted advertising can be helpful to people, but it can also sometimes cause people to buy things they don't need and/or can't afford. It also makes them more vulnerable to identity theft because there is more risk of private information being stolen.
2. Project Slide 9 and explain that if you want to limit the information companies can track about your behaviours, there are things you can do. Call on learners to read aloud the three options and answer any clarifying questions.
  • For Option 1, define cookies as small text files stored on a computer that keep track of what a person does on a website. (Slide 10)
3. Ask learners to complete the Lesson Quiz, and send them home with the Family Activity and Family Tips.

 

Extend the lesson

Have learners apply what they have learnt by completing the Ads on Social Media activity on TestDrive, a social media simulator. Learners go through a self-guided activity to reinforce key concepts and practise identifying advertisements on social media. For more information, download theSocial Media TestDrive Educator Guide.

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My Media Use: A Personal Challenge

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The Power of Digital Footprints

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