The old forum talked about student misbehavior and the lesson falling apart after it became too much fun to slander each other “icognito”
Today I had the students test their protocol by supplying them with song lyric snippets in foreign languages and doing silent room transmissions to avoid that. After partners had time to transmit and decode their messages they exchanged their papers and checked for errors to determine if the protocol was good enough. I collected their decodings as proof of work. I am not looking at the student protocols personally. Tomorrow they will present to the class and critique one another.
While projecting, I joined the simulator as a student and had a student also join. The rest of the class was able to see what was going on and I stressed that anything they sent would be seen by all. This seemed to help. I really like your idea of using song lyric snippets.
Karen
I make a very serious disclaimer about school appropriate conversations. I use the teacher view to immediately call out anyone who is inappropriate. It reinforces the concept that someone is or could be monitoring all internet traffic. I make a screen shot of any offensive chatter and have an 1-on-1 with the involved students. It is also an opportunity to talk about Internet safety and free speech.
For the back and forth, conversations I used corny jokes specifically knock-knock jokes.
I also do the same as @anmrobnott and emphasize appropriate behavior in internet sim. Our school has a Student Code of conduct that I also use to hold students accountable. This is a teachable moment where we can show that someone is always watching and consequences are inevitable. Next class I will show my students my log and have a deeper discussion on appropriate use of the internet.
I tweaked a rubric from another lesson so that I could grade their protocols and hold them accountable for completing it. I found that they spend a lot of time “exploring,” but tend not to write out what they are doing. Rubric