Every Kid Can #BeInternetAwesome

If you teach with Pear Deck you know how we feel about digital citizenship — it’s absolutely critical that kids learn to safely navigate the online world. As a company, our mission is to help teachers engage students every day. We believe in the promise of technology to achieve that mission, but we also talk about the inherent risks of the online world and are deeply concerned about the ways in which our lives are impacted by the ubiquity of digital technologies.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a push for schools to teach good digital citizenship, which is great. But we’ve also seen schools struggle to find comprehensive, trustworthy, and engaging content that doesn’t cost a fortune. We’ve even seen teachers dedicate their own time (those precious summer days!) to creating digital citizenship curriculum with Pear Deck slides that they can use in class. There has to be a better way to give kids access to this important information, right?

Introducing Google's Be Internet Awesome

Google’s Be Internet Awesome is a free digital citizenship curriculum, developed in collaboration with educators and online safety experts like the Family Online Safety Institute, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and ConnectSafely. We were excited to learn about Be Internet Awesome at ISTE 2017 and cheered as the team behind it developed an increasingly comprehensive set of resources for educators, parents, and kids.

The curriculum is geared to kids in elementary and middle school and includes fun and easy games, vocabulary lists, and activities designed to teach the basics like responsible online communication, keeping personal information private and safe, discerning between what’s real and fake, being kind, and preventing online bullying. Recognizing the value of this content, ISTE awarded Be Internet Awesome its Seal of Alignment for Readiness.

Given Pear Deck’s commitment to digital literacy and the quality of this content, we were thrilled when Google invited us to create a set of custom, interactive decks for Be Internet Awesome. 🎉 🍐🎉

Ready-to-teach lessons with Pear Deck Slides

We’re excited to be part of Google’s release of Be Internet Awesome 2.0, featuring 19 ready-to-teach Pear Deck presentations designed to accompany every lesson!

Pear Deck slides add a new level of engagement to Be Internet Awesome, making it even easier for educators to integrate dig cit content into their lesson plans. Designed to work in the classroom, each bite-sized lesson provides teachers with a simple way to introduce a concept related to digital literacy, guide students through related activities and games, and conduct quick formative assessments to make sure everyone is learning. These decks give educators the tools they need to lead the classroom conversation while ensuring that every student in class can participate equally and with confidence. For admins, completing the Be Internet Awesome curriculum through Pear Deck gives you a record of which teachers and classes have engaged with this important material.

We’re excited to be part of Be Internet Awesome and to help bring these lessons to classrooms all over the world. You can check out the full curriculum on the Be Internet Awesome official website.

Getting started is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Make sure you've installed the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on
2. Copy the interactive presentations to your Google Drive
3. Open in Google Slides and present with Pear Deck

It’s that easy to get started teaching digital citizenship and help students #BeInternetAwesome!

Helping kids be safe, more confident explorers of the online world. That’s the mission of Google’s Be Internet Awesome curriculum and it’s a mission we can get behind. Our kids will be spending more and more time on the internet as they grow. It’s important that they’re equipped to avoid the dangers and encouraged to use their time as wisely as possible. Working with Google’s Be Internet Awesome is one piece of our commitment to helping you teach students these critical skills. Thank you for helping students #BeInternetAwesome!

Ready to Be Internet Awesome? Get the full set of resources and Pear Deck presentation files on Google's site