Privacy Camp
Limited features lessen impact of solid online privacy insights
Pros: Videos on privacy bring important lessons to young kids.
Cons: The lack of control over the videos limits their usefulness.
Bottom Line: A nice conversation starter about important privacy concerns, but teachers will need to look elsewhere for more depth or detail.
Parents and teachers can use the videos as great conversation starters. Have kids do a warm-up discussion about each topic, predicting what their ideas are for good online safety habits, sharing, app use, privacy, and digital citizenship. Watch a video, then discuss what you saw. Have kids make posters of the tips and catchy slogans they hear, and consider posting these slogans in the classroom or at home.
Privacy Camp is a series of five short animated videos that explore important themes about online privacy for young children. Each video explores a theme: "Secure for Sure" offers easy tips to stay safe online; "Sharing with Care" discusses best practices for sharing text, images, and videos online; "How to React to Your App" cautions against oversharing and in-app purchases; "Mind Others' Privacy" alerts students to the importance of permission when sharing images or videos of others; and "Manners Matter" addresses good and bad online interactions, including cyberbullying. The videos all include big-picture insights about the theme at hand, a series of important tips, and a catchy one-liner to remind kids of that video's central insight. After watching each video, users earn a gold star.
The videos are approachably short: They clock in at less than a minute each, and the catchy one-liners that conclude each one (like "being polite just feels right") are approachable and appropriate for the target age range. The themes on offer here are great, too; there's a nice focus on digital life as an ongoing conversation between kids and their parents, and it's helpful to have such plainspoken advice about topics that can be tough for parents to broach with their kids, or teachers to broach with their students.
Unfortunately, there are some missing features one would expect to find here: The videos don't show a progress bar to indicate how long the videos are, and there's no captioning or pause options. These options would be a big help, since the child narrator of the videos talks very quickly, and it's easy for even a fluent adult English speaker to miss some of the good content that appears. In addition to more control over video playback, it would be great if kids could save or revisit the tips or slogans later, perhaps by saving them for future reference within the app or sharing them to another app. Overall, Privacy Camp has some solid insights, but families seeking more flexible features should look elsewhere.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Simple videos deliver important messages but lack interactivity to engage students
This app lacks any depth. The videos carry important messages, but there is no way for students to engage with and internalize the concepts. Mini-quizzes or other questions at the end of each video would help students to retain the information presented.
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