Social networks and you

Write the phrase ‘social network’ in the middle of the board, put some markers on a table, and ask students to think of social networking sites and things in connection with them, go up to the board, and write their ideas around the phrase. Tell them to collect as many sites and ideas as they can. Everybody should write at least one idea.

Once students have finished brainstorming, put them into pairs and ask them to have a look at the board and discuss the ideas. Have them make note of any item they don’t know or are unsure about. Let the class clarify any ambiguous idea.

Follow-up discussion

After discussing the ideas, continue with some questions, such as

• Which of these sites do you use on a regular basis?
• What do you do on these sites?
• Is there one you would/wouldn’t like to join? Why/Why not?
• What do you usually share?
• …

Oversharing

Turn your attention to sharing and oversharing. Ask students whether they think it is possible to OVERshare. If yes, what does that mean in terms of social networking? After they get the idea, elicit some situations when oversharing can backfire. Also, ask for personal experiences, stories — students are quite likely to have an opinion on this.

Data protection video

Play the video and ask students to write a reaction to the video. It can be a word, a phrase, or even a short sentence that expresses how they feel about the video. Ask them discuss their reactions in small groups.

Golden rules of data privacy

In this activity, students work in small groups. Each group needs to come up with 5 rules they think could lead to a safer and more privacy-conscious Internet use. Then, put together 2 groups to have bigger groups and ask students to look at each other’s ideas, discuss them, and agree on 5 (out of 10) that they consider the most important. Conduct open-class feedback on the rules and write them on the board; see if there are similarities or differences.

Note: if your has not done much debating/convincing, you might want to pre-teach some vocabulary on how to persuade each other.

Interview

Go back to whole-class mode and divide students into As and Bs. As now need to find a B that is not their neighbour. Once you have got the pairs, tell them that As are going to be the guy from the video and Bs are journalists. The journalists need to interview their partner on his last job interview and take notes. At the end of the activity, you might want to ask for some feedback on what the journalists learned about their interviewees.

Optional homework

Ask the interviewees to write an email to a friend about their job interview and the journalists to compose a magazine article based on the interview they conducted.