What is Secondary

Some activities that are typically regarded as “a waste of time” may inspire useful experiences in school contexts. This is the case of spamming. As competent users of digital technologies, we do everything we can in order to block spam messages (e.g., by choosing, training and updating anti-spam filters), but as teachers we can find that also in spam there is an educative potential that it is worth cultivating. This chapter presents a reflection based on an educational experience realized in a lower secondary Italian school during a course on Digital Literacy aimed at making students aware of different synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. In the activity presented here, the focus was on the analysis of different spam and phishing messages. Interacting within a wiki environment, students had the chance to reflect on the different elements that should be taken into account to detect strange and dangerous e-mail postings.