This is a really well done site that addresses text harassment and use of technology in violent/controlling relationships. An incredibly excellent approach recommended by Nancy Willard
This is James Robinson's class blog. It also hosts blogs from all of his kids. James teaches literature and writing at SAS (Shanghai American School). He's been blogging for about a year and a half. As you'll see if you visit this great example of classroom blog use, this blog rocks!
James is using Wordpress to create a website/blog presentation. He's happy to have teachers or students drop in and respond to the personal blogs his students have created.
If you're looking for a chance at an international student exchange blog connection, give it a look. (Heck, give it a look if you're just curious.)
The kids love to get comments from folks around the world so don't forget to be interactive!
Yes... we need to lead kids in the notion that they can be more than "I"... that they can be part of and participate in virtual (and physical) communities that can empower them and give them meaningful voice.
Are we consumers of each other’s social, cultural or material status or are we participants and contributors in larger projects that benefits us all?
Being a consumer does have its benefits, but the larger benefits are most certainly found when one contributes and participates with new levels of transparency.
June 2009 Report by CommonSenseMedia "Digital Literacy and Citizenship in the 21st Century: Educating, Empowering, and Protecting America's Kids," proposes eight key initiatives to develop a national digital literacy program and integrate it into our educational curriculum. This white paper is meant to be a "living document" and will be updated on a regular basis.
Third-party applications, he argued, can take that data outside of the friendly confines of a social networking site and combine it with data from other sources to piece together enough information to steal a person's identity.
When a business contact from the LinkedIn world wants to become your friend on Facebook, do you accept the invitation, giving them access to the photos on your Facebook profile from last summer's rowdy beach party?
And what about the person you don't really know who wants to be your friend because you have some friends in common? According to Hoffman, that new friend may just be mining your social circle for information. As networks grow and more friends of friends (and their friends) are accepted by users, it's unclear who can be trusted.
Hmmmm... this has occurred to me before, but I'm not sure how real it is our how paranoid we should be. However, we do need to take a look at our followers' digital footprints (blogs, tweets, posts, pages,...) if suspect.
According to Acquisti, people are more likely to divulge key personal information -- their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number -- on social networking sites than they would on other web sites
In one study, Acquisti found that that people will divulge information when they see others doing so. That tendency, he believes, may explain why so many people are willing to dish out personal information on the networks.
Holy Grail for marketers is to track consumers and their friends -- and what they say about a product -- via social networks. "People are more willing to divulge information for social purposes, and the lead users are 18 to 25 years old," Bradlow notes. "The social norms around privacy aren't going to be what they were before."
The information provides opportunities not only for legitimate business purposes, but also for the nefarious aims of identity thieves and other predators, according to faculty at Wharton and elsewhere.
But there's no one out in cyberspace to make sure they wash behind their digital ears and refuse cookies from online strangers. Given this potentially dangerous void, schools will increasingly extend their supervisory reach, giving lessons at every grade level on netiquette -- call it Online Manners and Ethics 101.
Understanding how to interact online safely and effectively is, and will be, ever more critical. As today's students grow older, they'll be using the Internet to apply to colleges and jobs, and to communicate and network with colleagues. Yet our children, however much they seem to have been born with iPods growing out of their ears, haven't learned to handle digital communications by osmosis, any more than they innately knew how to write a résumé or hold a fork.