Blog #3 - Mozilla’s Teaching How to Read, Write, and Participate on the Web – Web Literacy for Educators

The reading for this week was entertaining and different. At first, I felt like I wasn’t too sure as to where to start but I quickly found my way around the website. I found the website to be full of different activities and useful information we need to know for when reading, writing, and participating on the web. One of the first features that caught my attention from this website was the part where it talked about passwords under the teaching activities. I think this was extremely important to incorporate into such a website since nowadays we are constantly asked to create online accounts that require passwords. I found helpful for this website to have shared data showing the worst passwords created in recent years because this really gives an example about what passwords we shouldn’t be using. I was particularly happy to see that none of my personal passwords were listed in the lists they provided for worst passwords – apparently I have created strong passwords.

Towards the end of the password activity page there were links for you to actually test out passwords and see how weak or strong that password you entered would be. I found this section pretty entertaining because I actually tested a few of the passwords they have listed as weak and they were indeed weak passwords. Before testing them, I thought that some of the passwords were different enough to have as passwords; they seemed to be random words that people probably wouldn’t guess as a password. Then, when I tested them, they were actually coming up as weak passwords. I have to say though, I kind of wanted to test out some of my own personal passwords but I didn’t feel safe enough to enter my own password into that website. I had my crap detector hat on and the website seemed okay to use but my gut feeling was telling me not to enter my personal passwords there. So by only seeing if my passwords had the features needed to be a strong password, like a mixture of symbols and upper and lower case, I feel confident enough that my passwords are most likely strong ones. 

While on the website, I also went through the tools section which I found was fun and welcoming. In that tools section, I found a feature where I was able to alter a picture by what it seemed to be coding. The picture I was able to alter is below. I was able to alter the message in the picture. I always wondered how so many people were coming up with so many different “keep calm and …” fill in the blank messages. It was simple to do and user friendly. I was able to replace the words that show on the actual picture that were embedded into the code and replace them with whatever I wanted to write. The only thing that I couldn’t figure out all the way was how to save the picture that I had actually altered. What I ended up doing was taking a screenshot and saving it in my computer. Overall I found the website helpful and user friendly. Below you can see what the picture I ended up with.